For Impeachment Witnesses, Testifying Can Cost $15,000

Source: New York Times

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WASHINGTON — As a parade of State Department officials began trooping to Capitol Hill this month to testify in the impeachment inquiry imperiling President Trump, officials from the department’s union dispatched an appeal to its nearly 17,000 members. Send money, they pleaded.

For the second time since Mr. Trump took office, an investigation into his conduct has set off a scramble across Washington for lawyers to represent witnesses — and for the money to pay them. This time, instead of high-rolling players in Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, many of the witnesses are career government workers who helped shape or carry out policy toward Ukraine.

On civil-servant salaries, they have racked up bills of $15,000 or more for lawyers who can guide them through the morning-to-dusk sessions before congressional inquisitors. Already caught in a struggle between two branches of government, many are now worried about how to pay for legal advice that can cost $750 to $1,500 an hour. “We have never faced a comparable situation,” said Eric Rubin, a senior American diplomat who runs the union, the American Foreign Service Association. “Our colleagues are facing unprecedented legal bills.” He said his association has received a steady stream of donations, mostly in small amounts, since asking for them on Oct. 8.

The impeachment inquiry has some pluses for lawyers: opportunities to wrestle with high-profile legal issues like the limits of executive privilege and to reap free publicity escorting clients through a gantlet of cameras to the Capitol chambers where depositions are being conducted. At the least, they get a front-row seat in an inquiry that has gripped the nation. But a moneymaker it is not. Even if a client pays in full, representing a single congressional witness is far less profitable than the corporate work that is the lifeblood of many Washington law firms. “I don’t think anybody takes these cases because they are lucrative. They are not,” said Robert Luskin, who represents Gordon D. Sondland, a wealthy Republican donor-turned-ambassador and one of the inquiry’s few deep-pocketed witnesses. “You do these cases because you believe in the client or you believe in the cause or you believe in the process, not because they are financially rewarding.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/us/politics/impeachment-lawyers.html

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This is a mess. Granted, the folks coming in who are non-appointees are most likely working in the D.C. metro HQ offices where their salaries (based on the Locality Pay scale for that area) are higher than many other parts of the country. However they would generally be maxed out at GS-14s (maybe 15) if not part of the SES scale, and the cost of living down there (at least housing-wise) is ridiculous.

Of course with the wealthy ones like Sondland, it would be no big deal.