OK, let me guess: the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section is run by liberal Clinton holdovers?
Actually, the opposite. It is run by Andrew C. Lourie
Indeed, Lourie is seen by career prosecutors as a close ally of Noel Hillman, the outgoing section chief at Public Integrity who was nominated last week by the White House to a seat on the U.S. District Court in New Jersey.
Like Hillman and others in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Lourie traces his prosecutorial roots to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Hillman and Lourie worked together in the early 1990s in their first prosecution jobs tackling corruption cases as assistant U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, when Chertoff served as the head of the Newark office.
Eventually, Chertoff came to Washington, D.C., to become lead counsel to then-Sen. Al D’Amato (R-N.Y.) in the special Whitewater Committee that investigated the Clinton family’s financial dealings in Arkansas. Around that time, Lourie transferred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, where he handled money laundering cases and other major crimes.
When Chertoff took over the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in early 2001, he quickly put his stamp on that division — an imprint that can be seen to this day in how the Abramoff investigation has been run. He hired as his first deputy one of his assistant counsels on the Whitewater Committee, Alice Fisher. She eventually succeeded Chertoff when he left the division to become a federal judge in 2002.
In the Public Integrity Section, Chertoff pushed aside Lee Radek, who had been widely panned by watchdogs for a lack of aggressive investigations, and he reunited Lourie and Hillman. Lourie became acting chief of Public Integrity, with Hillman as his deputy, until October 2002, when Lourie returned to Florida and Hillman took over the section.
With Hillman’s departure from Public Integrity — he’s been nominated but is remaining inside Justice until he’s actually confirmed by the Senate — Lourie is taking over a reinvigorated unit that has aggressively pursued the Abramoff scandal and a variety of other public corruption cases.
It’s unclear whether Lourie will seek the job permanently in this stint at Public Integrity. The person in charge of the hiring will be Fisher, who is the political appointee who oversees the Abramoff investigation.
Internal agency rules require that the job must be formally posted for at least two weeks, and that a formal interview process must be undertaken. Under the best of circumstances, “the process could take several months,” Sierra said.
http://jackinthehouse.org/news/story-print.php?view=1630
The background is from earlier this year, but it appears he is still acting chief.