There are two articles about people, both written by former officials in that area of the government, in the Bush administration that should be gone:
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Bud Cummins, formerly a US attorney, gives five reasons why Brian Roehrkasse should no longer be working in the Justice Department. Here’s his preamble:
In 2006, the Department of Justice asked for the resignations of nine U.S. attorneys who had been appointed by President George W. Bush. I was among them. No president had ever fired his own appointees in such a manner, and a scandal was born when Congress started asking questions and getting fishy answers from the DOJ. Many months of lies ensued. Some of the dubious statements, such as those of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, were made during congressional testimony. Others came in the form of public statements made on behalf of the department. Today, most of those involved in the deception have resigned.
Most, but not all. One player who remains is a DOJ Office of Public Affairs spokesperson named Brian Roehrkasse, a Bush campaign worker in 2000 who went on to be a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation and for the Department of Homeland Security before moving over to the DOJ in 2005. Roehrkasse did more than perhaps any other DOJ official to disseminate the avalanche of untruths. A number of reporters have complained to me in private about having been deceived by him. But he never resigned. In fact, he was promoted by Gonzales in August to be the director of the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs.
The idea is that Roehrkasse has a history of lies. Any one of them could be explained away, but taken together they add to a person that should not be in the DOJ.
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Joseph Rich and J. Gerald Hebert, former chiefs in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, have an article at TPM (the Washington Post decided not to publish it) arguing that Hans von Spakovsky should not be confirmed for the FEC:
The shameful record compiled by von Spakovsky was detailed in two letters (available here and here) sent to the Senate Rules Committee earlier this year by six former voting section staff members who were under von Spakovsky’s supervision while at DOJ. Those letters not only cited grossly political actions by von Spakovsky, they also noted numerous other abuses, including an obvious conflict of interest when von Spakovsky refused to disqualify himself from reviewing the Georgia voter ID law after he published anonymously a law review article arguing in favor of such laws.
They, unfortunately, are typical of Bush administration appointees.
Filed under: politics
