The Good Soldier

(From http://www.bestlaw.com/attorneys/heffelfinger.htm)

Have you been following Tom Heffelfinger’s reaction to Goodling’s testimony?

For over a year, despite various provocations, he’s been a good soldier and refused to go after Main Justice, much less Rachel Paulose. The closest he came to criticizing his former bosses came when it was revealed that his name had been put on the chopping-block list before he resigned — which he still maintains was done without his being pressured by Gonzales and Company to do so.

But then Monica Goodling, in response to questioning by Representative Keith Ellison before Congress last week, said that he’d been zapped for spending too much time on Indian issues. In fact, as Ellison’s questions helped reveal, Heffelfinger was at odds with Mary Kiffmeyer, who was the Minnesota Secretary of State at the time, for refusing to pursue bogus voter-fraud claims against Native Americans.

That burst the dam.

As Heffelfinger tartly points out here, this was in the aftermath of the Red Lake school shootings, which were one of the worst school shootings in US history. He would have been derelict in his duty not to be handling them.

Even more interesting is how Goodling, Sampson and Gonzales paid far more attention to the ideology of current and proposed USAs than to their résumés or job histories. Check this out:

Heffelfinger also talked about Joan Humes, the lawyer who had been in charge of the civil division of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota, and said he had recommended her as his interim replacement when he stepped down.

“She’s an amazing lawyer, a great leader of people, and was the perfect person to serve as acting U.S. Attorney,” he said.

Humes’s name came up at the hearing in Washington, when Rep. Keith Ellison, the Democrat from Minneapolis, asked if she had been considered to replace Heffelfinger.

“You knew she was a Democrat, right?” he asked Goodling.

“I actually don’t know she was a Democrat,” Goodling said. “I did hear she was a liberal.”

The job went to 33-year-old Rachel Paulose.

Brief digression: One of the charges Paulose’s defenders have hurled at Heffelfinger is that the personnel in his office don’t like her because she’s a woman. This particular charge really ticked off the persons who left the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s office because of her mismanagement. (See also this link; the Strib’s 404ed it behind a pay wall, but a picture of the article still shows up in Snap’s cache, and you can use the title — “Workers who left Paulose Office protest remarks” — when looking for the article in Google or Google cache.)  Especially since one of those persons, Erika R. Mozangue, is female. In addition, if Heffelfinger’s office staff was made up of male-chauvinist old boys including himself, how come Heffelfinger’s first choice to replace himself was a woman, Joan Humes?

But anyway:

Heffelfinger has not taken issue with that choice [of Paulose] – what he questions is why the people making the choices, like Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson, didn’t seem to know the lawyers they wanted to fire.

“Mr. Sampson makes the following statement,” Heffelfinger said at the bar association speech, reading a copy of an email from Gonzales’s former chief of staff.

“Moreover, McKay, Heffelfinger, Iglesias, etc., had no federal prosecution experience when they took the job,” Heffelfinger read.

The crowd laughed. When Tom Heffelfinger “took the job,” he already had served as U.S. attorney once before.

I’m looking forward to the Bush clowns polluting Main Justice to piss off Heffelfinger some more. Then I suspect he’s really going to cut loose. Even good soldiers have their limits.