MT Greene Is Screwed. Lin Wood says She Stiffed Him For Legal Fees, It’s An Unreported Contribution In Any Event

Maybe the folks at Baskin Robbins could make up a new flavor of ice cream and call it MAGA. It would have to be a syrupy something that would ooze and flow over dry ice and explode from time to time, making one hell of a mess. It would be an orange/banana flavor, in tribute to both Trump’s complexion and the fact that apes like bananas and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lin Wood certainly qualify as members of the simian species more so than the human.

Today’s hellacious mess in MAGA world is that Lin Wood is claiming that he rendered legal services on two defamation suits Marjorie Taylor Greene was involved in. “One was a retraction demand Greene for Congress issued on July 8, 2020, to a GOP primary challenger over an ad Greene claimed was false. The second was a lawsuit filed against the campaign last August in Fulton County, GA, alleging the Greene campaign had conspired to defame an Atlanta-area mortgage company after it fired an employee under a politically charged cloud.”

Federal Election law says that lawyers can volunteer their services pro bono in certain instances, but defamation matters are excluded. Plus, Lin Wood isn’t saying anything about pro bono. He’s saying that Greene was his client and she didn’t pay him. The fact that she didn’t pay him is one problem, the fact that she didn’t even mention the debt to the FEC is quite another. The law requires that in-kind contributions be reported and this one wasn’t. Daily Beast:

Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, agreed that the supposed unpaid debt “should also be reported on the campaign’s disclosures,” and McPhail pointed out that unresolved sum could prevent the committee from terminating.

McPhail added that Wood himself would appear to have legal recourse under contract law.

“Attorney fees are a matter of contract between the lawyer and the client,” he said. “So if the campaign failed to pay [Wood’s] fees, and his retainer specified he was to be paid fees, then he could sue the campaign for breach of contract.” […]

In the campaign finance world, a “contribution” is not just money—it’s anything of value for the purpose of influencing an election. Goods and services, such as legal work, are considered “in-kind contributions,” and campaigns must either report receiving them or pay for them outright.

In this case, [campaign finance expert Paul] Ryan observed, it appears neither of those things happened.

“This could have gone a different way: A lawyer provides services, invoices the candidate for those services, and then the candidate pays for them,” Ryan said. “But it didn’t go that way here, and what we see is unpaid legal services that amount to an illegal contribution.”

Ryan added that the bottom line was that, “if a candidate pays, it’s fine; if not, it’s an in-kind contribution.”

The two right-wingers used to get along famously but that ended last spring when Greene replaced Wood on another defamation case and then Wood turned around and called Greene a “communist” and began blaming her for not doing enough to overturn the 2020 election. Now they hate each other and this is just grist for the mill.

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