Thompson Wins
Vetting Ashcroft’s deputy.

By NR’s John J. Miller and Ramesh Ponnuru
February 13, 2001 5:05 p.m.

f Larry Thompson becomes John Ashcroft's top deputy at the Department of Justice, the Left may claim that its unseemly jihad against the attorney general has paid dividends. But make no mistake: Thompson is a conservative, and he is well liked by many conservatives who knew him when he was a district attorney in Georgia. If Bush nominates Thompson, conservatives will support him.

Yet he's apparently a bit soft on the question of racial preferences. Thompson, who is black, resigned from the legal advisory board of the Southeastern Legal Foundation in 1999, right before SLF filed a lawsuit against the city of Atlanta's set-aside contracting program. "I believe he supports affirmative action for hiring purposes," says SLF president Lynn Hogue, who served with Thompson on the board. "But there's no question about whether he's a conservative. Nobody on our board is not a conservative. We're not interested in having fifth-columnists drawing us off our mission."

Thompson was on the SLF board when it decided to sue the Census Bureau over sampling. It also took Gary Aldrich as a client when Aldrich believed the Clinton administration was trying to block the publication of the book he wrote on his experiences as a FBI agent.

There is every reason to believe Thompson would be a strong candidate for deputy attorney general even if the Left had not made sacking Ashcroft a priority. Then again, the Washington Post's headline on the front page yesterday — "Atlanta Lawyer Likely Pick for Ashcroft Deputy: Move Aimed at Countering Criticism on Racial Issues" — suggests that Thompson is a candidate precisely because of his less-than-conservative views on racial preferences.