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The Boston Globe's Farah Stockman reports that Senate Foreign Relations committee staff are examining a third case of Bolton intimidation of a subordinate, this one involving China:
Meantime, Stockman quotes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the management practices that she expects from Bolton, which are in stark contrast to those testified to by Carl Ford on Tuesday. Said Rice:Lugar agreed to postpone the vote to give committee members enough time to read State Department documents about Bolton that had not been made available earlier.
Congressional aides said that they would issue written questions to the witnesses and that they were also probing another possible allegation that Bolton had intimidated a third analyst, this time on an issue involving China.
But Rice may be headed for trouble if she expects peace among Bolton's subordinates at the UN. Check out Jason Vest's piece in the Village Voice today, that draws on Bolton's time in Ed Meese's Justice Department, where, among other controversies he was involved in, Bolton tried to have an attorney there fired for taking maternity leave:''He has a lot of people who have worked for him who are loyal to him, and where he has brought out the best in his people. And that's the management that I expect from John and I fully expect to see," Rice said.
He was ultimately overruled by his Reagan era DOJ superiors. Go read.After his stint at USAID, Bolton went in 1985 to Ed Meese's Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs—in effect, Justice's lobbyist in Congress. By 1988, according to Washington lawyers and published accounts, Bolton was itching to leave government service for the world of high-priced lobbying. Yet Bolton stayed on at Justice, moving laterally to head the department's civil division, for a reason almost unheard of in a town that worships at the altar of the revolving door: No one would hire him to work as a lobbyist.
Why? According to a March 1988 Legal Times article, while many of the dozen-plus lobbying firms Bolton interviewed with acknowledged his formidable intellect, they nonetheless saw him as a liability on account of an "abrasive and combative tone [that has] cost him friends on Capitol Hill." ...
As Bolton shifted to the head of Justice's Civil Division in 1988, it seemed to many in Washington that he couldn't possibly do anything more to endear him to Congress less. Yet he promptly became then representative Pat Schroeder's whipping boy for trying to fire a Civil Division lawyer. The lawyer's firing offense, in Schroeder's view? Trying to take maternity leave.
As we said earlier, Bolton proves again to be the anti-mensch; the kind of guy who, when witnessing a robbery across the street, walks away thinking it's not his concern, as he told Bill O'Reilly.