Looming over all his political difficulties are his legal woes: two investigations delving into his alleged attempts to manipulate news outlets in his favor and a third investigation into an alleged deal exchanging political favors for lavish gifts from benefactors.
A benefactor can still lavish money on their club, they just have to spend it on bricks, mortar and scouts.
That's the bleak sense one gets from studying the recent Supreme Court argument in United States v. McDonnell, an appeal by the ex-governor of Virginia from his bribery conviction for accepting lavish gifts from a political benefactor and bestowing upon him in return broad access to government assistance and significant support for his commercial interests.
(Later in life, she informally adopted a series of protégés whom she considered foster children; she could be a needy and controlling benefactor, but she lavished upon her wards the gifts of maternal warmth and of faith in their potential of which she herself had felt cheated).
In New York City, such benefactors inevitably live in lavish buildings.
There was no room for any sort of extravagant lifestyle". The hearings disclosed, in fact, that rich benefactors had bankrolled a lavish life for more than 20 years.
A plausible excuse was offered by the cause of restoring Isaac II, whose son Alexius IV had escaped to the West to seek help, and who made lavish promises of reward to his benefactors.
Next, we were regaled with the New York Times story of a lavish fundraiser in the Hamptons hosted by the infamous David Koch, the billionaire benefactor of conservative causes.
A former Yonkers councilwoman and her benefactor, a political operative who testified that he had lavished her with gifts because he had fallen in love with her, were both convicted on Thursday in a corruption case in Manhattan.
Mortimer D. Sackler, a psychiatrist who was a co-owner of the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, makers of the controversial painkiller OxyContin, and whose lavish gifts to the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Columbia University made him one of New York City's most prominent benefactors, died March 24 in Gstaad, Switzerland.
