A salute to Rachel Paulose

Last week Rachel Paulose’s term in office as the United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota came to an end. Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten looks back on Rachel’s term in “A rumor riot buried the truth about Rachel Paulose.” Kathy introduces her retrospective with a point we have made here previously, capturing the ordeal by slander to which Rachel has been subjected, in the pages of the Star Tribune and elsewhere:

In a classic campaign of character assassination, the media dinned into our ears the claims of anonymous leakers in Paulose’s office. Over the months, the drip, drip, drip of rumor and innuendo resulted in the professional crucifixion of a fine public servant and a fine human being.
Paulose’s critics were primarily pundits and self-interested leakers, aided and abetted by former employees of the U.S. attorney’s office. They painted Paulose as an incompetent political hack who overemphasized Justice Department priorities such as child pornography and the sexual trafficking of women and girls at the expense of more important, local concerns, such as gangs, guns and white-collar crime.

Kathy’s review of Rachel’s record belies the critics’ charges. I have particulary enjoyed the tributes to Rachel that have come from the most unlikely sources, such as Stuart Goldbarg. Kathy introduces Goldbarg:

If Paulose was so effective, what explains her opponents’ enmity? Stuart Goldbarg of St. Paul has an idea. Goldbarg — who calls himself “a card-carrying John Edwards Democrat” — is on the board of Adults Saving Kids, an anti-prostitution and anti-pornography organization in Minneapolis that has joined other such groups across the nation in sending a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requesting that Paulose’s expertise should be preserved in her new job in the Justice Department.

Goldbarg makes a key point that we have also made here concerning the lack of a bill of particulars to support the media campaign against Rachel:

“When a new U.S. attorney takes office, you don’t normally see a campaign mounted to target the person’s reputation and make it impossible for that person to work,” Goldbarg said. In an open letter circulated among organizations fighting human trafficking, he wrote, “If, in the long months following the first accusations against Ms. Paulose, no one in a position to know the facts has offered a single shred of pertinent evidence, we can safely assume that the entire whoop-de-do is merely professional jealousy, disruptive and wasteful office maneuvering, and low-down character assassination.”

Rachel now returns to the Justice Department to work for Attorney General Mukasey.
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