Greasing a pick for U.S. attorney doesn’t carry quite the same whiff of intrigue as slipping away for a secret rendezvous with a vicious Nigerian dictator. But something about Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun’s maneuvering in the last few weeks has an awfully familiar ring to it. She’s explaining again, and that’s trouble.
In the summer of ’96, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, word got out that Moseley-Braun had spirited off to Africa to meet with Nigerian strongman Gen. Sani Abacha and Kgosie Matthews, her former fiance, without telling the State Department, the White House or her own staff.
As revolting as the trip itself was, Moseley-Braun’s explanations ran to the pathetic. She described her sojourn at times as a pleasure trip, a freelance diplomatic mission, and an effort to console the grieving Abacha family, which had lost a son.
It fit the pattern for Moseley-Braun, who has explained away all the questions about her campaign spending, explained away the Nigeria trip, explained away how her family divvied up an inheritance rather than use it to pay her mother’s Medicaid expenses.
Things have been looking up for Moseley-Braun since those days. She has largely stayed out of trouble, retired her campaign debt and made one of her problems go away by paying $120,000 to her former campaign treasurer, Earl Hopewell, to settle a lawsuit. If Hopewell’s suit had gone to trial, he might have expounded on his allegations of a hidden bank account and lavish spending in her campaign. The senator has been on a much-needed upswing, largely because she hasn’t been doing any explaining.
Oops, she’s explaining again. This time, it’s how she fumbled the choice of a U.S. attorney.
Moseley-Braun had a chance to look very good in choosing a replacement for former U.S. Atty. Jim Burns. She had already adopted the idea of former Sen. Paul Simon to leave the selection of federal prosecutors and judges to a commission of esteemed lawyers who probe the applicants and choose three finalists for the senator to consider. She let Sen. Dick Durbin in on the decision-making.
The commission is supposed to produce the very best candidates based on merit, not politics. At least, that’s what it says on paper. Moseley-Braun had former U.S. Atty. Tom Sullivan heading her commission. All she had to do was sit back, wait for the commission to report, and bask in the glow of putting the pursuit of justice ahead of rank politics.
But Moseley-Braun couldn’t leave well enough alone. She announced at the start that she hoped a good woman would apply for U.S. attorney, signaling to men that they would be candidates of last resort.
When the deadline to apply for the job passed, the commission had 16 candidates to consider. It included five women who had experience as federal prosecutors. It included a former state appellate court judge and a former president of the Chicago Bar Association.
But Moseley-Braun abruptly changed the rules. She extended the deadline, and just one more candidate applied–Ann Tighe, a former prosecutor, a friend of Moseley-Braun and the wife of Cook County Assessor James Houlihan. Tighe made the list of three finalists, along with Lassar and Andrea Zopp.
Left to their own devices, Moseley-Braun and Durbin would have picked Tighe for the job. But the newspapers and some bar groups loudly complained that placing the wife of a prominent Cook County Democrat in a job that routinely places Cook County Democrats in prison was a gaping conflict of interest.
Tighe was too hot to touch. But she wasn’t the only woman in the finals.
If Moseley-Braun wanted diversity, if merit mattered and politics didn’t, why didn’t she pick Andrea Zopp, a black woman, a former federal prosecutor, and a former first assistant state’s attorney who had the blessing of the merit commission?
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The answer, of course, is that politics counted for everything. The commission put Zopp in the finals, but Moseley-Braun would never have chosen her because Zopp was the top aide to former Republican State’s Atty. Jack O’Malley and was critical of Democrat Richard Devine during the 1996 election.
So Lassar got the job as the candidate of last resort. And Moseley-Braun got to explain.
Her press secretary said last week that Lassar got the edge because he was already in place and the Republicans might stall confirmation hearings.
But when Moseley-Braun met with the Tribune editorial board this week, she laughed off that explanation as a news media concoction. Then she offered a new explanation.
The candidate pool, she said, was “gruel.”
For most of them, she said, getting picked as U.S. attorney would have been a promotion. In the next breath, she said, “I don’t want to say anything bad about the applicants who did apply.” Imagine if she had wanted to say anything bad about them.
In the end, her manipulations earned her exactly what she didn’t want: a white male U.S. attorney who wasn’t her buddy and wasn’t friendly with the Democratic Party. And now she has a U.S. attorney who is doing his own explaining why he just lost a public corruption case brought against Chicago Ald. Ray Frias.
Some of the members of the merit commission have been burning up my phone to protest that their deliberations were high-minded and non-political and eminently fair. And maybe they were, at least from their end. But it seems like having a high-minded commission is pointless if the senator making the final pick wants to take the same old political road.
So, here’s a suggestion to Moseley-Braun. Scrap the commission.
The commission keeps talented people away. It is a difficult process–one person who sought Burns’ job told me it took at least 60 hours just to prepare the application.
“Why would someone who is at the top of their game go through this beauty contest?” someone else who was involved in the process told me.
Just make your choices for federal judges and prosecutors the old-fashioned way: Put the word on the street and take the best thing that comes along. Ask a couple of lawyers you trust to do the vetting. That’s how Jim Thompson and Tom Sullivan wound up as U.S. attorneys.
You’ll get what you want, no explanations necessary.