Former Attorney General John Ashcroft had any number of possible places to go in his post-administration life. Think tanks, law firms, lobbying firms — after successfully “securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror,” the right-wing world was his oyster.
So, where does the most controversial attorney general in a generation end up? Where else? At a college run by a TV preacher.
One month after leaving office, former U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft has a new job: He’ll be a part-time professor at a Christian university run by television evangelist Pat Robertson.
Ashcroft, 62, will begin teaching a one-week course on “leadership in times of crisis” on April 4 at Regent University in Virginia Beach. Jay Sekulow, a Regent University trustee, said the former attorney general will teach a two-week version of the same course during the college’s summer, fall and spring semesters beginning this year.
Ashcroft also will lecture on national security law and meet informally with students, Sekulow said. Ashcroft will be a “distinguished fellow” of the new Law and Justice Institute, which plans to do research to support lawsuits aimed at upholding Christian values.
Of course. What better way for a former attorney general to promote family values than to hook up with a TV preacher who blamed 9/11 on Americans; expresses his desire to see a nuclear bomb hit the State Department; believes Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists are the “spirit of the anti-Christ“; and once wrote a book asserting that George H. W. Bush may be “carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the dominion of Lucifer and his followers.”
I’m sure Ashcroft will be very happy at Regent; he’ll fit right in.