The Washington Post has a front page feature on Fred Thompson that focuses on his distinctly un-GOP former life as a litigator.
Before he was elected as a tough-on-crime U.S. senator from Tennessee or played a New York prosecutor on TV's "Law and Order," Fred Dalton Thompson worked as a lawyer who argued against the government's authority to regulate drug paraphernalia or to search a boat packed with 14 tons of marijuana.
Once, two decades ago, he urged that more witnesses refuse to testify before grand juries by invoking their constitutional right against self-incrimination, boasting that "I start on the assumption that my client will not testify." And over the years, lawsuits he filed helped a state worker win reinstatement to her job while exposing a parole bribery scheme and won money for the family of a Marine pilot killed by a helicopter blade when the family could not sue the Defense Department.
The piece also reports that Thompson accepted $1.5 million in donations from lawyers over eight years. While in the Senate, the Post's John Solomon writes, "Thompson routinely voted against legislation aimed at shrinking the size of fees that attorneys could collect and rejected limits on medical malpractice lawsuits, bucking his own party."
So Fred Thompson is a former trial lawyer who represented drug dealers (and big ones at that: 14 tons is a lot of weed), a former senator who opposed tort reform, a former lobbyist who worked on behalf of abortionists, and a former Watergate lawyer who was a mole for Nixon?
Wow, I can't wait until he officially joins the fray! These are gonna make some great negative ads!
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