Who Cares About Reality?
This is a final (from me, anyway) observation on the politicization of the office of United States Attorney by the Democratic Party over the past year. As Scott has noted at length, our friend Rachel Paulose, who by any objective standard was doing a fine job in the position, was forced out by the Democrats and their press minions after she committed the "offense" of defending herself against their partisan smears. The fatal defect that brought her down, ostensibly, was that she had a strained relationship with a number of her subordinates in the U.S. Attorney's office. A friend wrote to point out that such strained relationships with subordinates are not exactly a novel feature of Minnesota politics:
Rachel Paulose gets reassigned under a cloud for the way she ran her office while Amy Klobuchar, who had many, many more intra-office management issues, is in the Senate. Further, the press was indifferent at best and at worst, willfully ignored Klobuchar’s management problems so as not to hurt her campaign. They hounded Paulose from the start.
That's true. Klobuchar, the Hennepin County Attorney before she ran for the Senate, was unpopular with her staff, which pointedly refused to endorse her. But the fact was not widely reported. Another recent U.S. Attorney was so despised by his staff that they made a practice of removing his photograph from the wall of the office and hiding it. But he was a Democrat, too, so his management style and popularity (or lack thereof) were not issues.
But here is an even more salient comparison; it comes from a story in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune, which reports the story outside of the context of the controversy over the U.S. Attorney's office:
Violent crime is down 15 percent in Hennepin County so far this year, reversing double-digit increases in the two previous years.
Hennepin County includes Minneapolis and accounts for around half the population of the Twin Cities metropolitan area. So, let's connect the dots: during Amy Klobuchar's last two years as Hennepin County Attorney, there were double-digit increases in violent crime in Hennepin County. But over the past year, while Rachel Paulose has been U.S. Attorney, violent crime is down 15 percent. What accounts for the decline?
Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek gave much of the credit to his office's new Violent Offender Task Force, which targets the worst repeat criminals in the area. ***As Stanek learned in Minneapolis, the only way the Task Force can work effectively is cooperation from other agencies. Nearly every case crosses jurisdictional lines.
"The task force in Minneapolis was cutting edge," he said. "Federal agencies assigned people to the task force. Usually it was the other way around."
Now, let's connect one more dot, to the story on Ms. Paulose that Scott linked to this morning, from the same newspaper:
Lt. Andrew Smith, head of the Minneapolis Police Department's Violent Offender Task Force, has praise for Paulose and her staff. Since August, his investigators have put together cases that brought more than 30 indictments, the bulk against gang members."That's a great number," Smith said. "We've gotten very good service from her office. Attorneys have been available to us on weekends, holidays and at night."
The task force helped bring down the Tre Tre Crips gang on the city's North Side, a young and particularly violent gang, as well as the more established Bloods gang on the South Side.
Smith said Paulose's leadership had an impact, but he doesn't expect any setbacks when she leaves.
Of course, I wouldn't suggest that the presence or absence of Amy Klobuchar as Hennepin County Attorney or Rachel Paulose as United States Attorney is responsible for these crime trends. But presumably those who hold these offices have some responsibility for what happens on their watches. Simply looking at the facts, it is hard to understand why it is Klobuchar who is serving in the United States Senate and Paulose who is being run out of town. I think their disparate fates can be explained only by the one-sided political orientation of our local and national press.
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