{"id":10854,"date":"2007-05-19T16:00:51","date_gmt":"2007-05-19T20:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10854.html"},"modified":"2007-05-19T16:00:51","modified_gmt":"2007-05-19T20:00:51","slug":"id-rather-trade-places-with-jose-padilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/id-rather-trade-places-with-jose-padilla\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I’d rather trade places with Jose Padilla’"},"content":{"rendered":"

In March, we started hearing about the panic and paralysis<\/a> that had taken over the Justice Department in the wake of the prosecutor purge scandal. “You have no idea,” said one Justice official, “how bad it is here.” By one account<\/a>, top DoJ officials — the ones who haven’t resigned — were turning on each other. “It’s unreal — it’s open warfare over there,” a former Justice official with close ties to Gonzales’ team said.<\/p>\n

And it’s under these<\/i> conditions that the Justice Department needs to find a new Deputy Attorney General for a lame-duck administration, under a scandal-plagued Attorney General. How’s the search going<\/a>? (via TP<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Few in Washington have envied Paul McNulty over the past three months. But with the deputy attorney general’s resignation last week amid the scandal over the firings of at least eight U.S. attorneys, there’s one person whose position might be even less desirable: McNulty’s yet-to-be-named successor.<\/p>\n

“I’d rather trade places with Jose Padilla,” jokes Viet Dinh, a former senior Justice official under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n

I can’t imagine what’s holding potential applicants back. The last DAG was blamed for the purge scandal despite having been “largely left out of the loop<\/a>,” and his predecessor was James Comey, who had a rather unique experience<\/a> with Gonzales and the Bush White House during his tenure.<\/p>\n

And now no one wants the gig? Who would’ve guessed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In March, we started hearing about the panic and paralysis that had taken over the Justice Department in the wake of the prosecutor purge scandal. “You have no idea,” said one Justice official, “how bad it is here.” By one account, top DoJ officials — the ones who haven’t resigned — were turning on each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}