Lets have some fun

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Let’s have some fun with the comical Jonathan Snare, shall we?

As you’ll see below the appropriately named Snare is the lawyer representing the Texas Republican party in its hopeless, ill-conceived and comical attempt to shut down a satirical website mocking the Texas GOP’s connections to Enron.

Well, it turns out you don’t have to scratch too far to find out some other entertaining details about our man Snare.

Snare is “Of Counsel” at the San Antonio-based firm of Loeffler, Jonas & Tuggey, a politically-wired Texas law firm. Snare himself works out of the Austin branch.

Now, how about Loeffler? Thomas G. Loeffler?

He did a stint in Congress from 1979 to 1987. But he also turns out to be a close friend and long-time fund-raiser for George W. Bush — one of the president’s “pioneers.” In fact, according to this report by Texans for Public Justice, Loeffler was one of the top five individual money-givers to the president out of 212 ‘pioneers’ they looked at. Loeffler was #4 with $495,424 tossed into the pot, just behind #3, Ken Lay, with $574,550.

Really, calling Loeffler and Lay ‘pioneers’ hardly does them justice. In the effort to open up the GWB frontier, Tom Loeffler was more like the Meriwether Lewis to Ken Lay’s William Clark.

(Or maybe Lay is Lewis and Loeffler is Clark? For now, let’s say Loeffler is Lewis since we’re talking about him. If Lay feels slighted I’d recommend he drop TPM a line here and we’ll try to make it up to him.)

From the look of it, Loeffler’s forte is fund-raising not in ethics.

Texans for Public Justice says

Loeffler also topped a list of five members of Congress whose campaigns received illegal corporate money from Vernon Savings & Loan, which failed at a taxpayer cost of $1.3 billion. A Vernon officer told an ‘89 grand jury that Loeffler offered to set up a meeting with then Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III if they helped pay Loeffler’s debt from a failed ’86 gubernatorial bid. Four Vernon executives then moved $8,000 in laundered corporate money to Loeffler’s campaign, this officer testified, just before federal regulators forced them to resign.

At the moment, he seems well positioned to cash in on the GWB influence-peddling gravy train. His law firm’s DC office seems to be a lobby shop. I just hope he sticks to lobbying and stops having his legal goons harass the proprietors of small websites.

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