Four top assistants to Minnesota U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose resigned their management posts today [Friday] after expressing frustrations with her management style and priorities, according to sources familiar with the situation.The attorneys will keep jobs in the office, but no longer will have supervisory duties, the sources said.
"This is a decapitation of the office," said a source with knowledge of the office. "I've never heard of anything like this. People work all their lives to be at these high levels in the office. This is an extraordinary event."
That's a pretty sure way to draw attention.
Paulose must have figured that, having been special counsel to Paul McNulty (Gonzales' Deputy AG), she could do damned well anything she wanted with impunity and be backed by the DoJ, or she's a young (34-years-old) fool. Or both. Because now her office is front and center with the purged offices.
Paulose was sent in February of 2006 to replace resigning US Attorney Tom Heffelfinger. She went in as a temporary replacement (the first woman and youngest person ever in that position in that office), but took over on a permanent basis in December, confirmed by the Senate. It's kind of interesting to me that the four assistants waited until this moment to make their statement. Nice timing.
KMSP Fox News Minneapolis, reported that four "top staff" in the office "voluntarily demoted themselves Thursday, fed up with Paulose, who, after just months on the job, has earned a reputation for quoting Bible verses and dressing down underlings."
Wow. Fox News actually included that information? Perhaps they are banking on a backlash against the four by Bush base religious fanatics.
Connecting Paulose to the Purge
It seems that the purge list ex-Gonzales-Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson provided Harriet Miers originally included seven attorneys. By the time the list became public in the DoJ's document dump to Congressional investigators, three names had been "whited out" because they had resigned. The remaining four were among the eight who were eventually fired.
One question is, did they resign because they knew they were on the list and were given the option to resign or be fired? A second question is, was the Minnesota USA, Heffelfinger's, one of the redacted names on the original list? The Salt Lake Star Tribune noted that there were only three US Attorneys who resigned in that time period: "Utah's Paul Warner, Missouri's Todd Graves and Minnesota's Heffelfinger." That's three names for three "whited out" slots. Does that mean Heffelfinger's was one of those names? No, but it looks very suspicious.
As an incidental note, Paulose did not invite Heffelfinger to her big swearing-in party. If he hadn't been forced out, why snub him? He had been a Bush appointee, and in the past, the outgoing attorney has always been invited to the gala event welcoming the new one. She invited every other ex-Minnesota US attorney. (Heffelfinger says he retired a year earlier than was his plan, but that he wasn't forced out.)
Josh Marshall says Paulose was "big buds" with the just-resigned-and-taking-the-5th DoJ loose canon Monica Goodling, but I don't know where he gets that information. He also adds a little more info to the situation.
Apparently, the Gonzales Justice Department, already embroiled in a rapidly escalating scandal, was so worried about another shoe dropping (okay, more bad publicity) that they sent an emissary to the local office to beg the four to stay put.
Didn't work, though. As CBS put it:
The Bush Administration did not want to see this happen and in an eleventh hour attempt to prevent it, sent a top justice official to Minneapolis Thursday to mediate the situation. The mediation failed.
DoJ be rockin', and the White House be shakin' in time. Apparently the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Gonzales to come testify ASAP, and he chose April 17 (it takes time to rehearse for this kind of scrutiny). (And, apparently, the AP decided to change the details a bit.) Now the WH wants to get it over with sooner than later and out of the news, asking for an earlier date. The Committee says, Too bad. You made your choice.
Ooops.
Meanwhile, Democrats still won't put impeachment on the table, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are still in powerful positions, and the occupation of Iraq continues its devastation.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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