Just as the partisan, deep-state corruption characterized by the ongoing witch hunt in the other Washington has proved far more embarrassing to his accusers than it has to President Trump, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg’s personal unholy war against the Freedom Foundation on behalf of his friends at SEIU is destined to blow up in his face, too.
All it takes is a little exposure, and this week the story went national.
On Thursday, the TownHall.com website published a guest opinion from Freedom Foundation Executive VP Brian Minnich detailing how Satterberg, at the urging of his close friend Luke Esser – a lobbyist for SEIU 775 – continues to pursue a criminal theft case against a former SEIU employee accused of handing over to the Freedom Foundation excel spreadsheets containing the contact information for 4,000 home caregivers represented by the union.
It doesn’t seem to matter to the prosecutor that the data in question is considered public information or that the accused employee culled it from other sources rather than taking it from SEIU. What counts is that the Freedom Foundation contacted every name on the lists to inform them of their constitutional right to stop paying union dues or fees.
This is information SEIU has spent years and millions of dollars trying to suppress. And if that’s what the union wants, that’s what its paid cronies in elected office like Dan Satterberg intend to do.
Minnich notes:
“After setting up private meetings between SEIU and Satterberg on the prosecutor’s private cell phone, they met at pub. Satterberg allowed his deputy prosecutors to work hand-in-hand with SEIU’s private attorneys – even allowing them to edit certain prosecution documents. This political collusion was sealed when, one day after Esser made a political donation to Satterberg (in a non-election), Satterberg’s office filed indictments against the former employee.”
The end result was a shockingly compromised investigation of a non-crime with no evidence that’s no likelier to produce a guilty verdict than the Russian collusion charges against the president. But that was never the point.
Rather, the goal in both cases was simply to waste time and taxpayer money by abusing the power of a public agency to settle personal, political scores.
It isn’t working there and, ultimately, it won’t work here. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be a despicable spectacle in the meantime.
