How (and Why) Norm Coleman Got Rachel Paulose Appointed

Sen. Norm Coleman sponsored the appointment of U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose, who recently announced her resignation from that post after a very rocky tenure. He now acknowledges that her lack of experience or ability as a  manager undermined her effectiveness, and that she did the right thing by resigning. But Coleman expresses few  regrets about his role in getting her the job and says that, presented with a similarly qualified candidate, he would nominate her again.

In all likelihood, Coleman says, the position of U.S. attorney for Minnesota will be filled for the remainder of the Bush term by an interim appointee, chosen from within the current staff of the office.

For several weeks, I have been seeking to interview Coleman about the details of his role in Paulose’s rise and fall. Wednesday, we had that conversation.

Here are some of the highlights:

 
• Coleman says that he had no idea that Paulose’s predecessor, Tom Heffelfinger (below, right), was on a list of U.S. attorneys that the Bush administration intended to fire. He would have preferred that those compiling the list had contacted him, as the Republican senator from the state in question, and if they had, he would have told them that Heffelfinger was highly regarded, highly competent and should not be dismissed. Heffelfinger resigned in February 2006, but was not fired and has maintained that he, like Coleman, was unaware until it came out in subsequent congressional testimony, that his name was on the list.

 

• Coleman says he also was not consulted when the Justice Department disregarded Heffelfinger’s recommendation that his own top assistant run the office on an interim basis until a permanent U.S. attorney was confirmed and instead named Paulose to the interim job in March 2006.

“I wasn’t pleased with that,” Coleman said, feeling that tradition indicated the Republican senator should participate in such a decision by a Republican administration. He expressed his “deep concern” over it, and someone at Justice apologized to him.

 
• An even more powerful tradition is that the senior senator from the president’s party chooses a new U.S. attorney (although the nomination is made by the president). Coleman sent two names to the White House for the job: Clayton Robinson of the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office (an old friend of Coleman’s) and Paulose.

Why did he put Paulose on the list?

Coleman said she was already doing the job on an interim basis. “It was clear that within Washington, she had a lot of support.” She had sterling academic credentials and enthusiastic recommendations from federal Appeals Court Judge James Loken, for whom she had clerked, and two prominent DFLers in the legal establishment, former state Supreme Court Justice A.M. (Sandy) Keith and lawyer John French, both of whom had been mentors to Paulose.

It was perfectly clear that the Bush administration wanted Paulose for the job, but Coleman says that no one from the White House or Justice lobbied him at all on her behalf. He acknowledges that he was under no illusion that the White House might choose Coleman’s friend Robinson, but he submitted two names anyway because “I wanted there to be a choice.” He said that twice. I don’t know quite what it means. I’m guessing either that he did it either to honor his old friend, or as a small protest against the pressure to nominate Paulose.

I asked Coleman whether Minnesotans should honestly believe that Paulose was his choice or should see this as a case of deferring to the White House. He replied:

“A little bit of both. Let me say this: Certainly deferring, but as I looked at the background, independently, she would have been a choice of mine.”

He described Paulose as “a woman of extraordinary intellect … an immigrant background … attracting strong bipartisan support … The kind of woman you’d want to support.” Coleman said that during his public career, he has a history of appointing young women who broke through glass ceilings (he mentioned several names and added that he appointed Susan Kimberly of St. Paul, the first transgender deputy mayor in America).

But there was a major gap in Paulose’s resume, a lack of supervisory or management experience. When I suggested as much, Coleman replied: “Absolutely.” And when I suggested that as a former prosecutor himself who had occupied leadership positions in the office of Minnesota attorney general, he should know the importance of management skills for such as a post, he repeated: “Absolutely.”

Coleman says that at one point, before Paulose was confirmed but after she was serving as acting U.S. attorney, an anecdote reached him (he won’t give any details) that raised a concern that there might be a problem with the way Paulose treated subordinates.

“One thing I did do was I did communicate with the White House the concern about management experience, management skill. And one of the things I would have expected from Justice is that if issues like that arose, central Justice would have responded very quickly to those.”

Despite these concerns, when the permanent appointment of Paulose was confirmed just before the Senate recessed in December 2006, Coleman issued a press release taking credit for pushing the nomination through and expressing confidence that Paulose “will do an exemplary job.”

Four months later, four top leaders of the U.S. Attorney’s Office resigned their supervisory positions to protest the way Paulose treated them and others in the office. Her style of management and communications was described as insulting and dictatorial, treating disagreement as disloyalty.

Coleman said that when he heard about the turmoil, he thought back to the warning he had given to the Justice Department about monitoring Paulose’s management skills. He says Justice failed in that regard. In the aftermath of the resignations, Coleman publicly rebuked Paulose, urged her to “take immediate action to shed light on the resignations and address the concerns which have been raised relative to your management skills.”

Between then and November, Paulose’s situation crumbled. Her Washington allies lost their jobs, the staff remained alienated from her leadership, she was under official investigation for inappropriate personnel practices and received a damning performance review. Coleman edged into the camp of her critics. When Michael Mukasey was nominated to be attorney general, Coleman asked Mukasey to give the  festering situation in Minneapolis the attention it needed.

In the last days before she resigned, Paulose and some of her defenders publicly suggested that her problems were caused by critics who were biased against her for some combination of her race, gender, age, religion and her commitment to prosecute human trafficking cases. She did not produce any evidence that any of her critics were motivated by these factors. I asked Coleman if he subscribed to this theory. He said that he had no idea what motivated her critics and wouldn’t comment on the various bias theories.

Coleman said he didn’t encourage Paulose to resign, although he believes she did the right thing by stepping down. He doesn’t know what role his conversations with Mukasey had on the final outcome and played no role in negotiating a new job for her  as counselor to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Policy in Washington.

I asked Coleman if he had any concerns about Paulose getting that job after the failures of her tenure in Minneapolis. He first of all defended her tenure, saying it was harsh and unfair to characterize it as a failure. He said she had “no reservations” about her ability to do the new job, which will not require her to supervise a staff: “It’s fair to say that she had difficulties with management, with running an office.”

But Coleman repeated his high regard for Paulose’s intellect and legal skills, said he had “no regrets about recommending Rachel Paulose” to be U.S. attorney and “if I had a candidate like Rachel Paulose in front of me again, I wouldn’t hesitate to put her name in nomination.“