Paulose Offered Justice Department Position

That’s one way of solving the problem. Just breaking now from the AP:

Rachel Paulose, the embattled U.S. attorney for Minnesota, will be leaving the post to take a position at the Justice Department in Washington, according to a Bush administration official and congressional aide.

What position? We’ll have more when we know more.

No matter what position it is, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a way of defusing the problems with the 34 year-old Paulose. She was the focus of an Office of Special Counsel investigation into whether she’d discriminated against office employees, including allegedly using the words “fat,” “black,” “lazy” and “ass” in remarks to one employee.

And that was after four top attorneys in the office voluntarily demoted themselves in protest of Paulose’s Bible-quoting management style.

Update: The Star Tribune reports:

U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose has quit her job in Minnesota and will return to Washington, D.C., in January to take a job as a legal policy adviser to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy….

According to a press release issued by her office this afternoon, in her new job Paulose will advise the assistant attorney general for legal policy, who serves as the primary policy adviser to Mukasey and his deputy.

So it sounds like she’s returning to essentially the same job she had before she was appointed U.S. attorney for Minnesota. Before that appointment, she was “senior counsel to then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty in Washington, D.C., where she was also a special counsel for health care fraud.” It’s not a promotion — it’s a way out.

Update: Here’s Paulose’s resignation letter.

So just like that, another symbol of the Gonzales years is outta there.