Ex-DOJ Vet: Under Bush “We Might Have Gotten Away From” Tradition of IndependenceIt’s not just David Iglesias who thinks the Bush administration has inappropriately politicized the Department of Justice.
Paul Hancock, a former top official with the DOJ’s civil-rights division, told TPMmuckraker that during his tenure, the department responded in an independent and non-partisan manner to outside pressure to bring politically sensitive cases. But “I think we might have gotten away from that in this administration,” he said.
Hancock, who left the department in 1997, stressed that, in his view, it’s too soon to know whether the FBI’s investigation into ACORN is politically driven, and said that such investigations are not unusual. But they usually would not be aggressively carried out so close to an election, for fear of their existence being made public, and thereby affecting the election.
It remains unclear how far along the ACORN investigation is.