This is pay-for-play, of course.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- For colleges and libraries seeking a boldfaced name for a guest lecturer, few come bigger than Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice who rose from poverty in the Bronx to the nation's highest court.
She has benefited, too -- from schools' purchases of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the books she has written over the years.
Sotomayor's staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children's books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties.
And she uses her taxpayer-paid court staff to run her side-gig as a book huckster.
In her case, the documents reveal repeated examples of taxpayer-funded court staff performing tasks for the justice's book ventures, which workers in other branches of government are barred from doing.
...
"This is one of the most basic tenets of ethics laws that protects taxpayer dollars from misuse," said Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics and current general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Washington. "The problem at the Supreme Court is there's no one there to say whether this is wrong."
Supreme Court staffers have been deeply involved in organizing speaking engagements intended to sell books. That is conduct prohibited for members of Congress and the executive branch, who are barred under ethics rules from using government resources, including staff, for personal financial gain. Lower federal court judges are also instructed to not "lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance" their "private interests."
Her scam is requiring people to buy her book to stand in line to meet her -- and then she demands the school buy up her book to have them on hand to sell to people who want to meet her.
"For an event with 1,000 people and they have to have a copy of Just Ask to get into the line, 250 books is definitely not enough," the aide, Anh Le, wrote staffers at the Multnomah County Library. "Families purchase multiples and people will be upset if they are unable to get in line because the book required is sold out."
It was not an isolated push. As Sotomayor prepared for commencement weekend at the University of California, Davis law school, her staff pitched officials there on buying copies of signed books in connection with the event. Before a visit to the University of Wisconsin, the staff suggested a book signing.
...
Sotomayor, whose annual salary this year is $285,400, is not alone in earning money by writing books. Such income is exempt from the court's $30,000 restriction on outside yearly pay. But none of the justices has as forcefully leveraged publicly sponsored travel to boost book sales as has Sotomayor, according to emails and other records reviewed by the AP.
The "mainstream" media -- LOL -- reacted to this AP bombshell by... not mentioning it all.
The Associated Press committed a random act of journalism Tuesday when they ran a story exposing how left wing radical Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's staff pushed public institutions where she went to visit to purchase her memoirs or other books. Given the heavy interest given by the "big three" news networks on so-called conflicts of interest surrounding constitutionalist justices like Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas, the fact that the networks refused to report on this during their evening newscasts shows they are hypocrites.
Instead, the evening newscasts ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News covered a disruptive passenger forcing a commercial plane to land (ABC), Video of a volcano erupting in Iceland (CBS), and Leslie Van Houten's release from prison (NBC).