How would you feel?

If you were a member of a group universally acknowleged to be the best, smartest and most ethical lawyers in the world, and with the change of an administration, the organization of which you were proud, began to be destroyed from within, by fourth-rate duplicious hacks of which there seems to be no end.

What would you do?
Scott Horton at No Comment, on an interview with such a person.

The Department of Justice had, for decades, a reputation for attracting the brightest and most dedicated career public servants from law schools and law firms. Some of the most capable and most ethically demanding lawyers I have ever known went to the Justice Department or worked there. How must those people feel today? Isn't the answer obvious?

If you're having any doubts on that front, the current issue of Findlaw has a fascinating interview with the just-retired director of the Office of Information and Privacy at the Department of Justice, Daniel J. Metcalfe. He began serving the Department 35 years ago in the Nixon Administration. How does he assess the current situation?

Under Gonzales, though, almost immediately from the time of his arrival in February 2005, this changed quite noticeably. First, there was extraordinary turnover in the political ranks, including the majority of even Justice's highest-level appointees. It was reminiscent of the turnover from the second Reagan administration to the first Bush administration in 1989, only more so. Second, the atmosphere was palpably different, in ways both large and small. One need not have had to be terribly sophisticated to notice that when Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey left the department in August 2005 his departure was quite abrupt, and that his large farewell party was attended by neither Gonzales nor (as best as could be seen) anyone else on the AG's personal staff.

Read all