by hilzoy
In a comment, AndyK (is that you, saiyuk?) noted the following statement by Orrin Hatch on Meet the Press:
“Take Carol Lam, for instance. Carol Lam was raised on your program, Tim, by Schumer. Carol Lam, it’s amazing to me she wasn’t fired earlier because for three years members of the Congress had complained that there had been all kinds of border patrol capture of these people but hardly any prosecutions. She was a former law professor, no prosecutorial experience, and the former campaign manager in Southern California for Clinton, and they’re trying to say that this administration appoints people politically?”
As AndyK pointed out, this seems to be completely false. Here’s a bio of Carol Lam from the Washington Post. It lists her employment experience as follows:
“CAREER: Assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, 1986-2000; San Diego Superior Court judge, 2000-2002; U.S. attorney in San Diego, 2002-February 2007; legal counsel for San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc., February 2007-present.”
Any mention of being a law professor there? No. Is it at all likely that she spent fourteen years as an Assistant US Attorney without acquiring any prosecutorial experience? No. Her alleged experience as the campaign manager for Southern California for Clinton does not appear, and while it’s conceivable that this was an honorific job that she held while serving as an Assistant US Attorney, I can’t find any evidence that she was in any way associated with the Clinton campaign, and it seems wildly unlikely that Bush would have appointed a former Clinton campaign manager to a US Attorney’s job. Moreover, Avedon Carol reports this:
“Tuesday [Rachel Maddow] checked with Carol Lam’s people, who said that not only had she had nothing to do with the Clinton campaign, Hatch was also, um, misspeaking, when he said she was a former law professor with no prosecutorial experience – she had 15 years worth of experience, though she’d never been a law professor. The Clinton campaign people didn’t know her, either. So Rachel’s been pestering Hatch’s office all day to find out what his source was – and they just don’t seem to want to return her calls.”
That didn’t stop Rush Limbaugh from picking up the story, though:
” Carol Lam was a campaign manager! These people would normally be made ambassadors, but Clinton put her in as a US attorney. This is the kind of people that Clintons and Democrats appoint as federal judges. What I was talking about earlier, is their attempt here to insulate Democrats and liberals from election results. Now, Bush could have gotten rid of this woman when he took office. He chose not to. The new tone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Note not just that what Limbaugh says is false, but that he’s making a mistake that a simple Google search would have revealed. He is, for starters, claiming that Lam was a Clinton appointee whom Bush “could have gotten rid of … when he took office”, when in fact she was appointed in 2002. It would be a pretty nifty trick if Clinton had somehow managed to appoint US Attorneys two years after leaving office, but the truth is more prosaic: Carol Lam was appointed by Bush.
However: in the course of researching this, I think I have figured out what accounts for this bizarre set of obvious factual errors. Everything that Hatch says about Lam is in fact true of one of her predecessors, Alan Bersin. In an article on Carol Lam in the National Review, published a couple of days before Hatch went on MTP, Byron York writes this (while discussing how Lam was chosen for the US Attorney’s job):
“It wasn’t an easy job; the position of U.S. attorney for the Southern District had been wracked by politics in the previous decade. In 1993, Bill Clinton replaced the Republican U.S. attorney, a career prosecutor and veteran of 20 years in the Justice Department, with Alan Bersin, a law professor who had no prosecutorial experience but who had been a classmate of Clinton’s at Yale and head of the Clinton campaign in San Diego. (Bersin pledged to vigorously pursue Clinton priorities like environmental law.) In March 1998, Bersin resigned to become head of the San Diego school system. “
This article is cited by Limbaugh as background material for his story on Hatch and Lam, and it’s the only one of the four pieces so cited that mentions Lam’s background in any way. (1, 2, 3, 4.) Byron York is quite clear that it is Bersin, not Lam, who was a law professor and Clinton campaign manager with no prosecutorial experience. Nonetheless, I suspect someone misread either this story or another one that describes Bersin’s background in the course of discussing Lam, and that that accounts for what Hatch and Limbaugh said.
There are, I think, two take-home points from this. First, what Hatch and Limbaugh said about Lam is just plain false. Second, this was a mistake that someone should have caught. A moment’s thought would have revealed how utterly implausible it is to think that George W. Bush, of all people, would have appointed a Clinton campaign manager to a US Attorney’s job, and a simple Google search (or a rereading of York’s article) would have revealed that, in fact, he didn’t. Only people who are not particularly concerned about the accuracy of what they say would have said these things on the air when the slightest effort to check the facts would have made it clear that they were wrong.
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UPDATE: I meant to say this in the original post, but: for the record, I don’t think that appointing Bersin reflects particularly well on Clinton.
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UPDATE 2: Speaking of limited prosecutorial experience, consider Tim Griffin, the oppo researcher who is now our new US Attorney for Eastern Arkansas:
“The 38-year-old Griffin claims on his official Web site that he prosecuted 40 criminal cases while at Ft. Campbell, where he was stationed from September 2005 to May 2006. But Army authorities say Ft. Campbell’s records show Griffin only serving as assistant trial counsel on three cases, none of which went to trial.
Griffin didn’t agree to be interviewed about his claim of 40 criminal prosecutions versus the Army’s confirmation of three cases, all of which were settled as plea bargains. But Cherith Beck, a Griffin spokeswoman, suggested that Griffin’s higher number might refer to all cases he worked on in any capacity.
“Just wanted to clarify, make sure you had an understanding that prosecuted means it’s a case he handled while he was there; it doesn’t mean that it went to trial necessarily,” Beck said. “Prosecuted means he handled those cases in one form or another.”
Griffin’s prosecutorial experience at Ft. Campbell is important in evaluating Griffin’s fitness to serve as the top federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Arkansas since the bulk of Griffin’s legal career has been in political operations, such as opposition research on Democrats or work as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill.”
Orrin and Rush are lying to their audiences? i’m shocked!
(nice sleuthing, all)
Carol Lam, Michael Ware, rinse repeat. Lying as the first choice in the repetoire.
I’ll repeat my comment from the other thread, where it was somewhat OT:
In 1986, she went straight from her clerkship to a job as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of California: this was of course during the Reagan administration. She served with that title until being made Chief of the Major Frauds Section from 1997 to 2000. It’s unclear from Wikipedia, but it seems that she was appointed to a judgeship in 2000, which might thus be Clinton’s doing. She then became the US attorney in her region in 2002, appointed by the Bush administration.
According to Nexis, Carol Lam was a Superior Court Judge in San Diego in 2001. That’s the state court system, not federal, so she wouldn’t have been appointed by Clinton.
News stories from throughout the 1990s refer to her as being with the US Attorney’s office. I have no idea where the wingers are getting all this phony biographical information from. A San Diego Union Tribune article from 8/14/01 says:
Clinton’s US Atty appointee in Seattle was also a Yale classmate, Kate Pflaumer. I don’t recall if she had prosecutorial background but she acquitted herself well while she was in the position.
“There are, I think, two take-home points from this. First, what Hatch and Limbaugh said about Lam is just plain false.”
It’s also about as clear a case of libel as you can get.
Libel wouldn’t work here because they could claim to have simply confused the two, and it would be impossible to actually prove otherwise. That doesn’t excuse their behaviour but it immunizes them from that particular charge.
Well, it wouldn’t work if they ran a correction.
I don’t THINK either of the two are stupid enough to refuse to run a correction….
Hilzoy, thank goodness you tracked down what is almost surely the source for this nonsense! That aspect was driving me crazy — the sheer arbitrariness, and the consistent and complete inaccuracy.
As for Griffin, a sentence or two after Hatch’s quoted remark, he says, “Griffin, nobody doubts that he’s a good prosecutor.”
Nobody? I don’t merely doubt that he’s a good prosecutor. I doubt that he’s a prosecutor.
And, no, of course this isn’t me. The utter absence of puns should have made that clear.
Yours,
The Man Who Put the Wordplay Back in Swordplay
somehow this proves Lam deserved to be fired. i can’t wait to learn how!
I don’t THINK either of the two are stupid enough to refuse to run a correction….
Don’t get your hopes up.
It’s SOP. Start a story. It doesn’t matter if it’s true, it just has to resonate with the base. It doesn’t hurt to throw in some red meat, like “didn’t prosecute illegal aliens.” Now that Rush has repeated it, it’s gospel to the Bush faithful.
Speaking of appointments, something needs to be done about recess appointments, which I realize are not new with Bush, just yet another fuzzy area of his powers that he’s pushing to its limit. Since the Senate is now in recess, he’s appointed Sam Fox, the Swift Boat Vet funder whose nomination he withdrew last month, to be ambassador to Belgium. He’s also appointed privatization fan Andrew Biggs as deputy director of Social Security, after the Senate rejected him. Obviously Bush decided the Senate couldn’t possibly be any more angry at him.
If the current interpretation of the recess appointment power continues to stand, and presidents continue to take such advantage of it, the “advice and consent” clause seems close to meaningless.
I’m more concerned about Andrew Biggs being named as Deputy Director of Social Security. Since Bush has decided he can dispense with Congressional approval of, well, anything, I wonder if he’s going to try running his phase-out scam that way, too.
It is pretty hard to care who the Ambassador to Belgium is, though. That seems like a pretty painless political payoff as those things go. I guess they he was not a good enough pal to get Sweden or Norway.
“I guess they he was not a good enough pal to get Sweden or Norway.”
Hmm, slimy cold pickled fish and aquavit vs better-than-French French food and monk-brewed beer, that’s a tough call.
True, I should have listed Biggs as the main objection, but Sam Fox had made a bigger splash in the blogosphere, which is symptomatic of the problems with our politics.
I don’t think Belgium has a bikini team.
Appointing Fox has got to be one of the stupidest political moves I can think of. What did Mr. Bush gain from this appointment? Absolutely nothing. What did he lose? Lots of political capital. This was an obvious, blatant slap in the face of the Senate, an act of spite. Its only effect will be to convince senators that Mr. Bush holds them in the deepest contempt. Even those senators who decried the rejection of the appointment will still be taken aback by the spitefulness of this action.
The net effect of this appointment is that Mr. Bush will lose even more Congressional votes than he would have otherwise. What an idiotic move!
No USA on the planet is going to be anyone’s “honorific campaign manager” during his or her tenure.
Were you kidding?
Great jarb, Hilzoy.
About what York said about Clinton’s appointment of Bersin: Do you know it’s true?
Looks like it is true about Clinton and Bersin. And you’re right, it does look bad.
I suspect someone misread either this story or another one that describes Bersin’s background in the course of discussing Lam, and that that accounts for what Hatch and Limbaugh said.
So, as long as there is some kernel of truth in something related then we can fight like hell to make an excuses for these liars?
We spend our time trying to rationalize why these disgusting people should be given a break?
So let’s see, if Hatch ever comes clean, what do you think will be his excuse? Did we work hard enough to find him one that his cult will buy into?
People STILL haven’t awoken to how corrupt the right is. Fools.
Oh btw, Bush found a General to say we only needed 130 thousand troops in Iraq so all is well..he was just confused when he heard Shenseki.
I don’t see anyone “making excuses for these liars.” It’s simply more logical that Hatch and staff screwed up bigtime than that they would contrive this particular lie.
Now Hatch has attempted to come clean and, to my mind, has gotten dirtier in the process. There’s a post from Rachel Maddow at HuffPo with a response from Hatch’s office. The problem is that he claims to have “misspoken” and to have meant to be talking about Bersin at that moment and spoke Lam’s name by accident. But, in context, that makes no sense. Hatch is just going with “misspoken” in preference to “incredible sloppiness and stupidity.”
AndyK, I think you’re being too hard on Mr. Hatch. It is obvious that Mr. Hatch’s remarks applied to Mr. Bersin, not Ms. Lam. From there it is entirely reasonable to guess that Mr. Hatch mixed up the two in his mind and applied his description of Mr. Bersin to Ms. Lam. That’s a mistake, and one that deserves to be corrected, but it looks for all the world like a stupid slip of the tongue, not an Evil Plan to Conquer the World. The Republicans tell so many lies, why should we concentrate on minor peccadilloes when we have so many major crimes to occupy our energies?
Erasmussimo: AndyK, I think you’re being too hard on Mr. Hatch. It is obvious that Mr. Hatch’s remarks applied to Mr. Bersin, not Ms. Lam. From there it is entirely reasonable to guess that Mr. Hatch mixed up the two in his mind and applied his description of Mr. Bersin to Ms. Lam.
I strongly doubt is the case. Hatch began the statement by talking about the DOJ’s offered justifications for firing Lam, and attempted to bolster that by attributing Bersin’s resume to Lam. The first half of the passage Hilzoy quoted above applies to Lam, not Bersin, so for your explanation to work he’d have to have suddenly launched into a complete non sequitur, while still using Lam’s name. Occam’s razor says he or somebody on his staff got the story very wrong, whether through recklessness or malice, and anyone who repeated the falsehood in earnest failed to check his facts.
Gromit, surely you agree that the falsehoods that Mr. Hatch applied to Ms. Lam constitute a good description of Mr. Bersin. It is therefore obvious that there was a mental switcheroo inside somebody’s head. Perhaps it was Mr. Hatch; perhaps it was one of his staff. In any case, it seems most likely to me that this switcheroo was inadvertent. To believe that it was not inadvertent requires us to believe that somebody thought they could get away with such an obviously false substitution.
How many times do you see blog discussions where Commentator A replies to Commentator B for something that was actually said by Commentator C? People get things mixed up in their heads. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
I don’t think Belgium has a bikini team.
Maybe not, but it does have Hoegaarden. That makes up for a lot.
I understand your meaning now, Erasmussimo. I initially took “It is obvious that Mr. Hatch’s remarks applied to Mr. Bersin, not Ms. Lam” to mean you thought Hatch meant to be talking about Bersin, but slipped and used Lam’s name. The reason I mistook your meaning is that Hatch himself is offering that defense. His letter to Tim Russert (scroll down to the update), which AndyK was referring to, says “I accidentally used her name, instead of her predecessor, Alan Bersin, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton.”
So, while you might be right that Hatch simply got the facts mixed up, it’s pretty clear he’s not willing to admit as much.
But rather than admit to such a screw-up, he’s trying to pretend that it was just a “whoops, did I say Lam? I meant Bersin” kind of mistake. A discussion of Bersin’s history and qualifications would make little sense in the context of his remarks, so it seems pretty obvious that he didn’t mean Bersin at all, but had rather misattibuted his history to Lam. Of course, why nobody questioned the obvious absurdities and contradictions there is another question.
>>How many times do you see blog discussions where Commentator A replies to Commentator B for something that was actually said by Commentator C? People get things mixed up in their heads. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
I see it very often. In this case, I see you apparently doing this in regard to me, when you say:
>>That’s a mistake, and one that deserves to be corrected, but it looks for all the world like a stupid slip of the tongue, not an Evil Plan to Conquer the World.
The point of my post was that, indeed, I *don’t* think Hatch was lying in his MTP statements; I think he screwed up bigtime (or someone on his staff did), with egregiously sloppy research.
I *do* think he was lying in his letter, however, because — as I and others have pointed out — a mere name slip makes NO SENSE in the context.
Yes, a mistake, but the apolgy or correction was totally misplaced. There is no way, in the context of the discussion, that he meant to be talking about Bersin. But to say that he had the wrong information would be admitting to sloppy research.
Given all the misunderstandings we’ve all had here, it looks as if we’re not much better than Mr. Hatch — except for the fact that each of us seems willing to admit his mistakes. I can’t understand why Mr. Hatch clings to that ridiculous story when he could have chosen to say that he got the two confused.
Given all the misunderstandings we’ve all had here, it looks as if we’re not much better than Mr. Hatch — except for the fact that each of us seems willing to admit his mistakes.
I thought that DID make us much better than Mr. Hatch. Admitting mistakes, particularly FOOLISH ones, is the beginning of wisdom.
Does being powerful mean that you can never say “Ooops, I made a stupid mistake”?