I Alone Escaped McNulty's Clutches

In the summer of 1994, before my final semester at Grove City College, I served as a congressional intern for Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). The internship program included a weekly public policy seminar with GCC alumnus Paul McNulty, then counsel for D.C. law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge and previously spokesman for the Bush (senior) Justice Department.

At the time Paul was mulling a 1995 run for the Virginia House of Delegates. As the two of us got on reasonably well, and as I had worked on a winning 1993 campaign, and as I happened to be the only GCC intern from the Northern Virginia area, he asked if I might be interested in managing his campaign. Then came Newt Gingrich, the Contract with America, and the GOP tide which rolled over all of Washington in early 1995. Paul moved on to become chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, and I went in another direction entirely.

I watched with interest as Paul moved on to become the U.S. Attorney prosecuting John Walker Lindh, Zacharias Moussaoui, and other high-profile terror suspects. But I completely missed his rise to Deputy Attorney General until reading about the Moussaoui death penalty decision today. So on the one-in-a-million chance that you read this while googling yourself, congratulations, Paul.

You know you've arrived when you're important enough to be gratuitously villified by the looney leftists at the Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and others. They were certain back in October that Paul "The Grinch" McNulty was a Bush loyalist being installed to axe independent prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald; and they seem genuinely upset about his bang-up job of prosecuting terrorists! The left's paranoid demonization of the Justice Department seems foolish enough most of the time; it's yet more poignant when you know and respect the target personally.

Keep giving the terrorists hell, Paul. Oh, and how about a tip for an old acquaintance just before you impose the police state?