The Elizabeth Warren campaign has been trying to drag her poll numbers back up after a rather dramatic drop-off. Why the drop? Apparently Medicare For All isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The more people read into the Warren camp’s massively complicated and incredibly shady taxation structure of Medicare For All, the less they like it. This has allowed Pete Buttigieg to gain the lead in Iowa at the moment, pushing Warren down the polls. So, Warren decided to press Buttigieg about his work as a lawyer for the McKinsey consulting firm, in likely hopes of sinking his Iowa numbers, even as the press asked her for similar records.

Asked by @cbszak if she would release her pre-08 tax returns if Pete makes his fundraisers open press, Warren shakes her head. “This is about the conflicts he is creating every single day right now” later adds conflicts r “when candidates for president sell access to their time” pic.twitter.com/u0m869TugF

— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) December 7, 2019

Buttigieg responded with some details, claiming others were protected by a non-disclosure agreement.

Now more than ever, the American people deserve transparency from their president. I’m urging McKinsey to do the right thing, and in the meantime, I’m providing a summary of my work.https://t.co/EfQF0cGoDL

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) December 7, 2019

The Buttigieg campaign then demanded some transparency from Elizabeth Warren, asking about her tax returns and her legal history – especially her record of representing corporations while she was a professor at Harvard Law School.

So, on Sunday night, the Warren campaign did a document dump. And of course, the “I hate billionaires” rhetoric that Senator Warren has been spewing doesn’t really sync up with Professor Warren’s willingness to consult for big, evil corporations.

Warren’s consulting work often involved companies dealing with bankruptcy, which was her specialty as an academic. Her campaign had been asked repeatedly for the information and had declined to release it multiple times.”

Her work for some of the companies doesn’t fit neatly with her current presidential campaign brand as a crusader against corporate interests.”

For instance, the documents released Sunday show that Warren made about $80,000 from work she did for creditors in the energy company Enron’s bankruptcy and $20,000 as a consultant for Dow Chemical, a company that was trying to limit the liability it faced from silicone breast implants that were made by a connected firm.’

Earlier this year, Warren had released a list of about 50 cases that she worked on, but the descriptions of the work were at times misleading and the amount of income and dates for her work were not included.”

While the cases released by Warren’s campaign stretch over more than three decades, the figures disclosed Sunday show that nearly all of the money was made from cases filed after she got her job at Harvard in 1995. (Warren was elected to the Senate in 2012.)”

The income includes about $212,000 for representing Travelers Indemnity Co. in 2009, and $190,000 for what her campaign described as representing a chain of department stores owned by PA Bergner & Co. in the mid-1990s.”

Hmmm. Looks like Lizzie loved her some corporate cash when she was just Harvard’s only Native American law professor. Now that she is a wealthy white senator, she has the freedom to shun the evils of capitalism and decry fundraising from the wealthy. Never mind that she loved a good fundraiser before she started running for president. All that campaign cash that she raised for her Senate re-election campaign went straight into her presidential campaign, which gives her a comfortable head-start to eschewing donations from those “millionaires and billionaires.”

So, why do this document dump late on a Sunday night, when it could be all in the headlines come Monday morning? Why, because the media is going to be not just distracted, but doubly distracted today.

There is an impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee today, which means that the media is going to be completely preoccupied with anything and everything impeachment-related. And if the media is not seeing, hearing, and breathing their fever dream of impeachment, they are going to pay a little lip service to the release of the long-awaited inspector general’s report about potential FBI misconduct. The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee undoubtedly decided to schedule an impeachment hearing for Monday in order to overshadow the IG report finally being released. The Warren campaign staff, knowing that the media will have little time to do more than sift through the basic details of just how much money the senator made in consultant work, decided to document dump just before a field day for impeachment, and by the time the media cares to actually question Warren about any of the details, she will be able to brush it off as “old news.”

Will this help Warren’s poll numbers? Probably not. But hey, Joe Biden says that she might make a good vice-president!

That just feels so incredibly encouraging, right? Right???

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click