There is nobody—N.O. Body—doing better journalism right now than the good folks at ProPublica. On Wednesday, working in conjunction with the Kansas City Star, they dropped a huge load of dead fish on the head of one of the least excusable hominids practicing politics today: Kansas Secretary of State—and likely Kansas’ next governor—Kris Kobach. It seems that, in addition to being one of America’s most virulent xenophobes and also one of America’s top vote-suppressors, Kobach is quite the grifter, even by the standards of the Era of Trump, which are formidable ones.

Apparently, Kobach reportedly fashioned a lucrative side career as a kind of full-service immigrant-bashing operation on behalf of any city or town run by people who were suckers enough to pay him. Kobach would help a town fashion a draconian anti-immigrant statute. Then, when the statute inevitably was taken to court, he would defend it. And because Kobach is as good a lawyer as I am an acrobat, he would lose. The town would get soaked. And Kobach would walk away with a nice, fat fee.

“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”

Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns — some with budgets in the single-digit-millions — ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances. Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Penn., took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. In Fremont, Neb., the city raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns are currently enforcing the laws he helped craft.

Jesus, Fremont. You hiked the property taxes to pay this charlatan? What was the vig on that? Anyway, it was nice work if you could get it.

Records obtained by ProPublica and the Kansas City Star show that since 2005 Kobach has made at least $800,000 through this advocacy. At least $150,000 of that was paid during Kobach’s time as secretary of state. (Kansas law permits government officials to moonlight.) Those dollar amounts are almost certainly an undercount. Valley Park, Farmers Branch, Fremont and Hazleton provided financial documentation, but Maricopa County did not. Given the minimum fees stipulated in his contract with Maricopa County, Kobach made at least $12,600. It’s likely that he was paid far more. (Both Hazleton and Valley Park said the cost of the trial was defrayed by donations.) Kobach was also paid by the Immigration Reform Law Institute and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, two arms of the same organization, from 2005 to 2018. Federal forms show the organization paid Kobach a total of just over $125,000 in 2005 and 2007. Such organizations are not required to disclose annual payments of $50,000 or less, suggesting he received smaller amounts in other years.

(An aside: Elected officials in Kansas can moonlight? Twenty generations of Massachusetts pols just sat up in their graves.)

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The sad hilarity of it all came when Mr. Kobach went to court, and repeatedly got his head handed to him.

He championed an immigration ordinance and advocated hiring Kobach. Valley Park and Hazleton both passed ordinances within days of each other in July 2006. The ACLU had warned both towns that they’d face lawsuits if the ordinances passed, and the organization quickly followed through on the threat. Hazleton lost decisively. The city of fewer than 30,000 people was defeated both at the trial court level and on appeal. Its ordinance never went into effect. Even then, Kobach maintained a serene confidence. By 2013, seven years into the litigation, a privately raised legal defense fund that had paid Hazleton’s bills (including $250,000 for Kobach’s fees) had run dry. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to hear the city’s case. The ACLU had asked an appeals court to order Hazleton to reimburse it for $2.4 million in attorneys fees.

Despite that, Kobach told the Hazleton paper, the Standard Speaker, that the city shouldn’t expect many more substantial legal bills. “At this stage of the game, costs are much lower for both sides,” he said, adding that “they are minuscule costs as opposed to costs at the front end of a lawsuit.” That may have been true to the extent that he was describing his own fees. But a year later, Hazleton was ordered to pay the ACLU $1.4 million to cover its attorneys’ fees. At the time, the town was already $6 million in debt. It was forced to take on additional loans to pay the bills.

Kobach lost because he is a lawyer who is really bad at law, but really good at monetizing hate and weaponizing fear.

The legal process would have been far shorter and less costly if Kobach hadn’t insisted on rewriting the ordinances during the litigation, said Omar Jadwat, who heads the ACLU’s immigration project. It confused the parties and slowed the process, Jadwat said, asserting that the purpose was to “iterate through different versions and try and find something that could stick.” Kobach, he contended, “was looking at these municipalities as kind of laboratories for his experiments in policy making, and he ran up a lot of bills in the process.” Kobach oversaw two revisions of the law in Hazleton while the suit was pending. In Valley Park, too, Kobach overhauled the ordinance during litigation. The once-broad measure was narrowed to prohibit knowingly hiring illegal immigrants — something that was already banned by federal law.

One of these days we are all going to have to come to grips with the fact that, when he said there was one born every minute, Mr. Barnum was low-balling it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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