Washington Post

Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein write "Political Appointees No Longer to Pick Justice Interns" in Saturday's Washington Post.

They say: According to a former deputy chief in the civil rights division, one honors hire was a University of Mississippi law school graduate who had been a clerk for U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. about the time the judge's nomination by President Bush to a federal appeals court provoked opposition by congressional Democrats, who contended that Pickering was hostile to civil rights. A few months after he arrived, that lawyer was given a cash award by the department, after he was the only member of a four-person team in the civil rights division who sided with a Georgia voter-identification law that was later struck down by the courts as discriminatory to minorities, according to two former Justice lawyers.

Their story gains meat and interest by throwing Judge Pickering's name in it, but in reality this person was not a clerk, but an intern who got his position at DoJ without reference from or even knowledge of Judge Pickering.

They say, "According to a former deputy chief in the civil rights division" so the writers didn't get it wrong because presumably that former deputy chief DID tell the Wash Post that information...it just turns out he was wrong; the source provided bad information. Without inside knowledge of the rest of the story, I wonder what else was wrong.

This isn't a defense or criticism of the issue of the story or the person mentioned, just wondering what Judge Pickering had to do with it at all...