Croesus-Democrat Michael Bloomberg, with a net worth of $55 billion, could pay the entire tab of the Democrats' 2020 election effort if he wanted and notice no dent in his pocketbook.

Buying an election, so they say.

He's doing something quite a bit sneakier: he's buying a government. Seriously, in the manner of privateers of old, he's offering "gifts" of "free" left-wing lawyers to state attorney general offices with the express purpose of undercutting President Trump on greenie regulations. Naturally, only Democrats among them accept.

According to the Daily Caller, which found the news on some New York University alumni booster brag sheet:

Bloomberg Philanthropies financed a group that is planting private attorneys into state attorneys general offices for the explicit purpose of pushing back against Trump's regulatory rollbacks. "What's problematic is the arrangement through which a private organization or individual can promote an overtly political agenda by paying the salaries of government employees," Indiana Attorney General (AG) Curtis Hill, a Republican, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, citing a common criticism of New York University's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center (SEEIC). Bloomberg's philanthropy supported the center with a $6 million grant. The NYU School of Law launched the group in 2017 to "identify and hire NYU Law Fellows who serve as special assistant attorneys general in state attorney general offices, focusing on clean energy, climate and environmental matters," according to the NYU Law website.

From their government perches, these left-wing lawyers paid for by Bloomie and pals have filed more than 300 state lawsuits to gum up the agenda of the Trump administration. Much easier to file it from the state than the private sector, see. The Caller notes that Bloomberg has "seeded" the government with these renta-leftist lawyers as a means of priming his own entrance to the presidency with Deep State operatives waiting for him.

So when you hear about a state like California launching another lawsuit against Trump over some reasonable or popular decision he's made — say, on getting rid of unreasonable fuel standards — you can rest assured that it wasn't someone you elected, even if you voted Democrat, who's doing this; it's quite possibly the work of a far-left presidential candidate seeding the offices with his own "people" to do his bidding over that of the currently elected president.

It's an army of mercenaries, paid for by some outside actor. This is why Republican attorneys general are questioning and suing about the measure. If the government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people, why should left-wing billionaires be free to embed "their people" in to take action from a non-accountable basis? Would it be OK if the Saudi king or Vladimir Putin decided to offer similar "gifts" to advance their own interests, too? How about Trump himself, or Charles Koch? The whole thing strikes at the heart of representative government and replaces it with a government of billionaire minions, mercenaries loyal only to the billionaire paying their salaries and calling the shots. Since most of these billionaires practicing this now are lefties seeking to pull up the drawbridge on millionaires and other upstarts who'd also like to get rid — Bloomberg certainly is — it's a direct conflict of interest with the will of the people, and it can only get worse.

Call it privateering.

The Daily Caller reports that this isn't going over well with GOP attorneys general, who are suing to end it:

"Democratic state AG offices are taking on seasoned attorneys being paid by a radical liberal Democratic Presidential primary candidate," he said before suggesting the special assistants "wield state police power" to lay the ground work for Bloomberg's climate agenda. Republican Georgia AG Christopher Carr is also expressing concerns about the optics of such a mission. "AG Carr has serious concerns about this program and the ability of these lawyers to represent a state in an unbiased manner," Katie Byrd, a spokeswoman for Carr's office, told the DCNF. Georgia doesn't accept private money when it employs such assistants, she noted. Other officials inside the Republican ecosphere want media to do more to flesh out Bloomberg's work.

The other thing they can do, besides sue to block Trump, is block law enforcement operations against leftist groups and the Bloomberg operation itself. Bloomie has already demonstrated that he's willing to use his own companies to shield himself from scrutiny, ordering the company he founded, Bloomberg News, not to cover his campaign, focusing only on President Trump instead. You can bet those A.G.s embedded in state attorney general offices are not going to "notice" anything amiss with operations affiliated with Bloomberg, either. They know who writes their paychecks, and it's not the locals they lord it over for their own good on Mike's dime.

It comports with a lot of sleazy rigging practices Bloomberg has also been caught doing. The Caller notes the media rigging — Bloomberg's blocking of his own reporters from covering him, of course, but also that Bloomberg took a large number of Bloomberg News operatives into campaign operatives, effectively on the Fusion GPS model. Worse still, he founded "Hawkfish," a shadowy company with no website that secretly collects information on voters by collecting every keystroke. I commented on that earlier here.

This is an amazing corruption of representative democracy for personal ends. It's the sort of thing Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro would do to rig their own Venezuelan government with partisan operatives. It's not democracy, it's plutocracy. The GOP attorneys general in other states launching the lawsuit are right to want it stopped right now.