Madison, WI—Now we know. McClatchy Newspapers reports that US Atty Biskupic "who prosecuted a state Democratic official on corruption charges during last year's heated governor's race was once targeted for firing by the Department of Justice, but given a reprieve for reasons that remain unclear ...
"Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic's name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation."
The timeframe is unclear, but something turned the DoJ around favorably on Biskupic. I'm voting for his prosecutions of voting fraud and Georgia Thompson, and an attentiveness to Republican electoral concerns.
Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo has been all over the Biskupic story, says of the development, "This will be big."
Update: Today’s New York Times reports that DoJ e-mails obtained reveal the partisan nature of DoJ deliberations on which US Attys were to keep their jobs.
“Some of the new documents show the department’s acute awareness of individual United States attorneys’ political and ideological views. An undated spreadsheet attached to a Feb. 12, 2007, e-mail message listed the federal prosecutors who had served under President Bush along with their past work experience.
“The chart included a category for Republican Party and campaign work, showing who had been a delegate to a Republican convention or had managed a Republican political campaign. The chart had a separate category indicating who among the prosecutors was a member of the Federalist Society, a Washington-based association that serves as a talent pool for young conservatives seeking appointments in Republican administrations.”
Biskupic’s rating on the right-wing ideological chart is low, the man had something about which to be worried, were he interested in maintaining his US Atty position.
- Regards to Folkbum for deriving the chart from the US House of Rep. Comm on the Judiciary, and for his excellent piece on Biskupic. -
Update II:
Study Reveals Partisan DoJ
This has been out for awhile, but it is worth noting the politicized DoJ context in which US Atty Biskupic functions.
An ongoing study by Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan notes that “(d)ata indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.”
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