The Times on the Meltdown in the Mini-Apple

By Scott Horton

The New York Times' David Johnston reports Saturday on the mass resignations in the U.S. Attorney's office in Minneapolis. It's a curious story that shows how effectively the Times can be spun by a government agency that sets its mind to the spinning. We hear from nameless Department of Justice spokespersons who hype and preen Ms. Paulose and assail her critics. She's the first woman and the first person of South Asian extraction on the job, we hear, and then:

Ms. Paulose's defenders at Justice Department headquarters said the criticism of her was unwarranted. They said older lawyers had difficulty dealing with a young, aggressive woman who had tried to put into place policies important to Mr. Gonzales like programs to combat child exploitation.

So there you have it: we're talking about middle-aged men who can't cope with a successful woman. Got it? Well, Mr. Johnston omits to tell us who the senior assistant U.S. attorneys are. One, Erika Mozangue, the former head of the civil division, is a young woman. An inconvenient fact, I suppose.

But beyond this, I puzzle over Mr. Johnston's willingness to let unnamed DOJ sources carry the bat for Ms. Paulose when they are obviously delivering the official line—delivering statements that stack up right along side those of the official DOJ spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse. The rationale for agreeing to reproduce an unnamed source in a situation like this is generally that the source would face repercussions from speaking publicly. Not a chance of that applying here. Mr. Johnston owes us the identity of these unnamed DOJ spokespersons, particularly as they are spinning the story: disseminating truthiness and describing a situation in Minneapolis about which they have no direct knowledge.

But Johnston makes the case that we should perhaps be thinking of the Gonzales Nine, and including Minneapolis.

Mr. Heffelfinger said he left voluntarily and had been under no pressure to resign. He was, however, not among the Justice Department's most highly regarded prosecutors, according to department officials. They have not said whether, before his resignation, he had been on a list of possible candidates for removal. E-mail released by the department suggests that Mr. Heffelfinger may have been on a preliminary list.

The slurs cast at Mr. Heffelfinger, again by unnamed DOJ sources, are a dead give-away. I'd say it's time for Heffelfinger to come clean and tell us how he was swept aside to make way for Paulose. Every time we look at this affair it gets a little bigger and a little seedier.