Another DOJ Departure
The exodus of top Justice Department officials continues with Richard Hertling--embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's point man in dealing with Congress--slated to resign next week to take a top policy job with the soon-to-be-announced presidential campaign of Fred Thompson, a senior Justice official confirmed to NEWSWEEK.
Hertling, who has been serving as acting attorney general for legislative affairs, is the latest in a parade of departures in recent months that is threatening to leave the Justice Department virtually denuded of senior political appointees. Since the controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys erupted earlier this year, more than half a dozen top officials have either resigned or announced their intention to do so, including Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, his chief of staff, Michael Elston, Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer, Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and White House liaison Monica Goodling.
"The Titanic is sinking," Bruce Fein, a former top Justice Department official under the Reagan administration and a sharp Gonzales critic, said today about Hertling's resignation. "The fact is the department has become dysfunctional. Gonzales is going to be left with no subordinates."
A mild-mannered and well-regarded former Senate staffer, Hertling has been in the line of fire in the battle over the abrupt and seemingly inexplicable firings last year of nine U.S. attorneys. He has also been forced to repeatedly clean up public misstatements by the attorney general and others at Justice, turning over a steady stream of newly discovered internal e-mails and other documents that have contradicted previous explanations for why and how the prosecutors were dismissed. In one notable example, in March Hertling had to send a letter to Congress retracting the department's previous denial that White House aide Karl Rove's office had no involvement in the replacement of the U.S. attorney in Arkansas--a retraction that, along with other revelations, ultimately led House and Senate Judiciary committees to subpoena documents and testimony from White House officials. (The White House this week asserted Executive Privilege over the documents and said it was instructing two subpoenaed former officials--ex-Rove political deputy Sara Taylor and ex-White House counsel Harriet Miers--not to testify.)
There have been no allegations that Hertling himself misled Congress; instead, even congressional critics have accepted that he was simply passing along to lawmakers assertions from higher ups that later turned out to be inaccurate. For his part, Hertling has told colleagues his resignation is not directly related to the U.S. attorney flap; instead, he has told them he was eager to go to work for Thompson, for whom he once worked as a press aide in the Senate. "Ever since Thompson's name first got mentioned, Richard was hoping and praying that he would get into the race," said one senior department official, who asked not to be identified talking about personnel matters.
Still, Hertling's job is one more top post that the attorney general will now have to fill at a time when he is under siege from Capitol Hill. In recent weeks, Gonzales has been struggling to find replacements for McNulty and others. Although he has personally sought to recruit candidates to fill the top slots, the attorney general has found few, if any, takers. One veteran lawyer who was recently approached for a high-level position (and who asked not to be identified talking about private conversations) said he made it clear that he had no interest in going to work for the Justice Department right now. "Are you crazy?" the lawyer said when asked if he would consider the idea.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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