David Boies, the left-wing lawyer famous for taking on Al Gore's hanging chad Florida election disputes in 2000, turns out to have been the facilitator of an army of private investigators who tracked actresses making sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood studio big Harvey Weinstein and the reporters reporting it.

That would be the same David Boies who defended Michael Moore for his illegal Cuba-junketeering in the making of the movie Sicko, a phony Potemkin-village account describing the glories of Castrocare, and the same David Boies who defended CBS after its disgusting smear job on General William Westmoreland, who sued.  A list of Boies prominent cases can be read here.

Now it turns out he was defending Harvey Weinstein all along, the biggest sex-harassing pig in Hollywood (actually, anywhere).

Functioning almost exactly as Perkins Coie did in its hiring of Fusion GPS to collude with the Russians on behalf of Hillary Clinton, Boies's firm paid a group of former Mossad types in a private investigative firm called Black Cube to tail and use pretext meetings to worm information out of Rose McGowan and the reporters she was talking to in order to spike the stories that would come of it.  Other actresses were targeted as well.  As in the case of Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS, big money changed hands, almost the same amounts in both cases.  Black Cube got $100,000 on the first shot and $600,000 eventually.  Apparently, these are the going rates in big smear operations, which both of these were.

A brilliant account of the shenanigans, flawlessly investigated in great detail, can be read in the New Yorker by Ronan Farrow, who did one of the earliest exposés, and certainly the strongest one, on Weinstein after numerous efforts to spike it.

The role of Boies is appalling for more than one reason: he was not only trying to defend the odious Weinstein, but also making it risky for others to expose him.  It was he who was throwing all the roadblocks to exposing the monster.

His response to that was hypocritical:

In retrospect, I knew enough in 2015 that I believe I should have been on notice of a problem, and done something about it. I don't know what, if anything, happened after 2015, but to the extent it did, I think I have some responsibility. I also think that if people had taken action earlier it would have been better for Mr. Weinstein.

Well, guess why there was no "people had taken action earlier"!  It was because of him.

His claims of it all being a "mistake" are disingenuous, too.  In the New Yorker piece, he says his mistake was in not picking the investigative firms.  This is irrelevant, a straw man, a begging of the question.  The problem was the mission itself that he paid for, not the particular players.

Lastly, he was being a bad attorney by doing this.  He represented the New York Times at a time when, in working with Weinstein, he was also trying to stop the New York Times from publishing its own exposé of Weinstein.

From Axios's morning email:

P.S. CNN's Brian Stelter has this statement from The Times:

• "We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm's lawyers were representing us in other matters. We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe. It is inexcusable, and we will be pursuing appropriate remedies."

What a guy.  As sleazy as the left he represents.