The Times recites that Paulose is also charged with having “used a racial epithet in reference to another employee.” I’ve known Rachel for ten years. For those of us who know her, the allegation is absurd on its face. Among other things, Rachel is herself an Indian-American immigrant sensitive to racial slights. I’ve never heard Rachel utter a swear word or cast a racial aspersion. In her first on the record statement regarding this charge, Paulose states: “I NEVER made any such statement. I have told the department so, and the department is defending me against this outrageous and defamatory lie.”

Paulose adds: “The McCarthyite hysteria that permits the anonymous smearing of any public servant who is now, or ever may have been, a member of the Federalist Society; a person of faith; and/or a conservative (especially a young, conservative woman of color) is truly a disservice to our country.”

The Times story had additional counts in the indictment against Paulose. She is said to have embraced the Bush administration’s law-enforcement priorities, including the administration’s call for aggressive prosecution of child pornographers and criminals involved in human trafficking. Here Paulose pleads guilty, taking special pride in the tripling of child-pornography cases and the 32 trafficking indictments brought by the office under her leadership, including perhaps the largest pending trafficking case in the country. Indeed, trafficking expert and National Review Online contributor Donna Hughes of the University of Rhode Island testifies that Paulose “has quickly become one of the leading anti-trafficking prosecutors in the country.” Hughes adds: “That alone is enough to make her the subject of attack.”

Paulose now stands accused by the Times of having embraced the prosecutorial priorities of the Bush administration. The Times puts it this way: “It was Mr. Heffelfinger’s abrupt departure as United States attorney in February last year that led to the initial suspicion that Ms. Paulose had been sent to Minneapolis to serve Mr. Gonzales’s agenda rather than that of career prosecutors in the office.” The Times has things backwards; it either labors under, or desires to promulgate, a basic misunderstanding. The office of the United States attorney does not exist to serve the agenda of career prosecutors. It is proper for the president and attorney general to set law-enforcement priorities and for their appointees to implement them. Indeed, refusing to do so is insubordinate. (One could add another count to the indictment against her; Paulose believes in the administration’s prosecutorial priorities.)

In short, the Times finds the gravamen of the case against Paulose in her implementation of the priorities of her superiors and heedlessness to the dictates of her subordinates. In its own peculiar way, the Times seems to have lurched into the truth of the case against Paulose: It presents a test for Michael Mukasey after all, but it is one that he will pass only by standing behind her.

— Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to Power Line.

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