The WSJ has a good editorial today on the shady dealings behind Sen. Chris Dodd’s Irish ‘cottage.’ And while we’re on the subject, I was perusing an old column by Kevin Rennie, the former Connecticut state legislator who broke the cottage story, and noticed this interesting tidbit:

During the fourth quarter of 2008, Dodd’s Senate re-election campaign — Friends of Chris Dodd, indeed — paid $65,000 in legal fees to the firm Perkins Coie. So far, Dodd has spent more than $120,000 of campaign funds on his defense. The law firm is the single largest expense of his re-election campaign and it is for a personal matter. From October through December of last year, Dodd’s re-election campaign spent nearly a quarter of what it raised in that period on legal fees.

Rennie notes that a large chunk of those campaign funds came from banking interests. So I don’t know about you, but I find it awfully reassuring that in the middle of a major economic crisis and the accompanying government bank bailouts, the head of the Senate Banking Committee is indebted to bank lobbies to pay the legal tab for his personal corruption.