1/15/01 4:15 p.m.
Vetting Ashcroft
Can anybody pass the Chavez standard of full disclosure?

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

id John Ashcroft break the law by having state employees help his 1984 campaign for Missouri governor? That’s the charge raised today in the Washington Post, which notes that Senate Democrats are likely to quiz Ashcroft about the 1983 deposition of a former aide who said he regularly conducted campaign business during the daytime from Ashcroft’s state attorney general office. Ashcroft has denied the allegations, through Mindy Tucker of the Bush transition team: “Any political work that was done was done off hours, on or vacation time.”

This dispute probably won’t evolve into anything more than partisan finger-pointing, with Democrats who already want to vote against Ashcroft now asserting that he’s a lawbreaker, and Republicans saying there’s no proof he did anything wrong. But the episode raises an interesting question, given the events of last week: Did the Bush team know about this potential controversy before it hit? Did it know about the deposition of Thomas A. Deuschle, Ashcroft’s former aide? Did it know that during a related deposition, Ashcroft himself, on the advice of his lawyer, refused to answer questions about his political fundraising?

Finally, did Ashcroft volunteer this information to the transition? After all, it was Linda Chavez’s failure to disclose a non-crime that torpedoed her support among transition officers and derailed her nomination for labor secretary.

“We don’t comment on the vetting process” said Mindy Tucker, when asked whether the transition knew about this potential controversy. “These allegations against John Ashcroft are about something that did not occur.”

It’s nice to see the Bushies standing by Ashcroft, a fine man who doesn’t deserve this current ordeal. But it would have been even nicer to see them stand by Chavez, too.

Rough Justice
Bill Lann Lee, the Justice Department’s civil-rights head, has devoted much of his tenure to defending racial preferences around the country. But perhaps he hasn’t spent enough time tending to matters in his own office — because now he thinks he has to call in the diversity cops. On January 9, he circulated a memo: “I have retained a diversity consultant to review the Division’s workplace climate and to make recommendations on how further to promote diversity and inclusiveness through the Division’s attorney employment policies and practices. I am writing to ask each of you to support the work of Scendis, our consultant, as it undertakes its 90-day project. Scendis is charged with determining the extent to which our organizational policies and practices with respect to attorney personnel issues can and/or should be modified. ... All information collected by Scendis will be destroyed after the project is completed, and only the summary-level data will be included in its report. ... This is thus envisioned as the first of several steps in a continuing process of examining and improving our workplace environment.”