The New Team
A series of profiles of potential members of the Obama administration.
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Title: Jamie S. Gorelick - Being considered for: Attorney general
Source:
NYT
URL Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/u ... malink&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Published: Nov 10, 2008
Author: ERIC LICHTBLAU
Post Date: 2008-11-10 17:01:12 by Jethro Tull
Keywords: None
Views: 317
Comments: 16
As he prepares to take office, President-elect Barack Obama is relying on a small team of advisers who will lead his transition operation and help choose the members of a new Obama administration. Following is part of a series of profiles of potential members of the administration. The latest on the 2008 election results and on the presidential transition. Join the discussion. Name: Jamie S. Gorelick Being considered for: Attorney general Would bring to the job: A wide-ranging Washington résumé that spans corporate, legal and national security affairs. Ms. Gorelick (pronounced Guh-REH-lick) was the No. 2 official at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, from 1994 to 1997, and if chosen would be the second woman to be named attorney general, following her former boss, Janet Reno. Ms. Gorelick would also bring corporate experience to an Obama administration at a time of financial crisis. Is linked to Mr. Obama by: Deep contacts in Democratic circles and a background in civil rights. But Ms. Gorelick backed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries and contributed early on to her campaign, which could work against her as a contender. She contributed $10,000 to Mr. Obama57;s presidential political action committee in August, after his nomination was all but assured. In her own words: 60;You know someone respected you if they called you 56;sir,57; 61; Ms. Gorelick said, alluding to the glass ceiling at the Pentagon, where she worked as general counsel in the 1990s. 60; 56;Ma57;am57; is what you call your mom.61; Used to work as: Vice chairwoman at Fannie Mae, the giant mortgage lender, where she was paid a reported $25.6 million in salary and other compensation from 1998 to 2003. She went on to join the Washington law firm Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dorr as a partner, where she has represented a range of clients, including Duke University in defending claims brought against it by some of its lacrosse players in a highly publicized rape investigation. She was a Democratic appointee on the 10-member commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. Carries as baggage: Her work at Fannie Mae, which had to be bailed out by the government in September as part of a $200 billion deal. Ms. Gorelick left the company just as it was coming under attack for huge accounting failures. She has also drawn criticism for her role at the Justice Department, in which she allegedly created an intelligence 60;wall61; that hindered counterterrorism agents in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks. Conservatives called for her removal from the Sept. 11 commission, but her fellow members rallied around her and said critics were distorting her record. The criticism grew so heated that the F.B.I. investigated a death threat against her family, and President Bush had to intervene personally to stop the Justice Department from releasing sealed reports involving her. Some conservative bloggers have already begun trying to derail Ms. Gorelick57;s possible nomination as attorney general, pointing to her experiences at both Fannie Mae and the Sept. 11 commission. Résumé includes: Born May 6, 1950, in New York City and raised on Long Island in Great Neck. Graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School. Active in the bar association in Washington, D.C., and on women57;s legal issues. Named by Legal Times as one of the 60;greatest Washington lawyers61; of the last 30 years. Married with two children
Poster Comment: By chance, Bet Tzedek Legal Services sponsored a program on the American Patriot Act just about the same time readers were beginning to get their copies of Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America." It was a perfect combination. The Patriot Act, hurriedly passed by Congress and signed by President Bush after Sept. 11, 2001, gives the federal government new power to find out about our private, business and academic lives. Roth's book projects what happens when government runs wild with such power. Both the book and some of the implications of the Patriot Act touch the insecurity that hides deep in the hearts of many Jews -- that our nation's constitutional protections could vanish, and with them the safety and opportunity that brought Jews to America. Nicholas Lemann, Washington correspondent for The New Yorker and dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, made the connection between Bush and Roth quite nicely when, in writing about the book, he described the perpetual wariness of the Jewish soul: "Emotionally, it could happen here. It could happen anywhere, any time. It has happened practically everywhere. It's also the case that President Bush activates in many Jews the same emotions that Roth activates in 'The Plot Against America.' He may have activated them in Roth himself." Perhaps that explains the interest of a substantial audience at Sinai Temple on Oct. 4 for the symposium "Pursuing Justice and the War on Terrorism." For the past 30 years, the event's sponsor, Bet Tzedek has enlisted the constitutional guarantees of a fair justice system on behalf of Los Angeles' poor. The Patriot Act erodes these guarantees by greatly increasing the power of federal law enforcement agencies to wiretap, monitor Internet use and e-mail communications, obtain records of library borrowing and bookstore purchases and gather information on customers from financial institutions and other businesses. The government has new power to investigate foreigners, meaning immigrants can come under heavy scrutiny. In the past, the constitutional guarantees weakened by the Patriot Act have often -- but not always -- protected political, religious and ethnic minorities from the tyranny of state oppression that has periodically taken hold of federal, state and local governments in the United States. Roth's "The Plot Against America" takes place in 1940. The new president is Charles Lindbergh, Hitler admirer and anti-Semite, who begins exporting Jews from Jewish neighborhoods in the Northeast to areas where they would be a minority -- the beginning of an American Holocaust. Most Jews undoubtedly consider such fears far-fetched. I do. But a lot of Muslims don't, particularly immigrants and children of immigrants who came here from the Middle East. They have rational and justified fears about the government's growing ability to snoop and to arrest. Even the most assimilated Jew might, consider that, historically, Jews have been in the same boat as Muslims -- and could be there again. Such catastrophic thoughts were not expressed by the panelists, Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 Commission; Rabbi Elliot Dorff, a member of the Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards; and Viet D. Dinh, the main author of the Patriot Act. Dinh, who was an assistant attorney general when he wrote the Patriot Act and now is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, is an upbeat, articulate man who, while fleeing as a boat child from Vietnam, survived harrowing experiences and poverty. To Patriot Act supporters, his life story counters charges that the law is a threat to immigrants. His personal story is inspiring, but the implications of his words at the symposium were troubling. The Sept. 11 attacks, he said, were an assault on "the essential order" of a nation. And the cops who preserve such order are not the enemy. "The single greatest threat is from Al Qaeda, not law enforcement," he said. At another point, he said, Americans might have to give up some liberties in the face of danger. Is that necessary? No, said Gorelick. She, like Dinh, served in the Justice Department where she was deputy attorney general before her appointment to the 9/11 Commission. Speaking from those two perspectives, she said there were "laws and procedures in place" that could have caught the Sept. 11 terrorists. And Dorff said, "If we protect ourselves at the expense of our national character, what have we protected?" A few days after the seminar, I bought Roth's book. His 1940 Newark was foreign to me. I never had to fight my way through anti-Semitic gangs on my way to school or be deprived of a good assignment by an anti-Semitic boss. But as a reporter, I have covered cops, courts, the civil rights movement, urban riots and student rebellions. I have seen the fragility of constitutional guarantees of due process when society feels threatened by protestors, rioters, by crime and, now, by terrorists. They can bend and break, as Roth, writing from the depths of Jewish paranoia, envisioned. Gorelick and Dorff hinted at the same thing in their much more reasoned manner. The words were different but the message was the same.
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The Caucus
Patriot Paranoia?
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#1. To: Jethro Tull (#0)
Great. An AIPAC lawyer as Atty. General. The Bolshevik brew becomes more distilled with each passing day.
#2. To: bluegrass (#1)
AIPAC, Jewish, FMae, FMac, 9-11 Commission & the Klinton administration! What a resume. Change baby change!
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Replies to Comment # 1. Great. An AIPAC lawyer as Atty. General. The Bolshevik brew becomes more distilled with each passing day.
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