Ashcroft Profits from War on Terror

This is the way journalism is supposed to work. The Hill breaks a story on how the former US attorney general's lobbying firm is pushing to approve the sale to South Korea of an early-warning radar system made by an Israeli company with US technology. The competing bidder, BTW, is an American company, Boeing. Then the Chicago Tribune follows up on John Ashcroft's three-month-old career as a lobbyist, primarily "centered on companies that want to capitalize on a government demand for homeland security technology that boomed under sometimes controversial policies he promoted while in office."

In year-end filings, Ashcroft's firm, The Ashcroft Group LLC, reported collecting $269,000, including $220,000 from Oracle Corp., which won Justice Department approval of a multibillion-dollar acquisition less than a month after hiring Ashcroft in October.

That represents in some cases only initial retainers or billings, the Trib explains. Oh, and there's a touch of irony: "As attorney general, Ashcroft sued Oracle in 2004 to try to block an earlier acquisition by the company."

There's nothing illegal about what Ashcroft is doing, the Trib points out. It's just, well, tacky. "To take the kind of prestige and stature of the attorney general [and lobby] . . . . It seems a little demeaning of the office, honestly," the Trib quotes John Schmidt, an associate attorney general in the Clinton administration, now a lawyer at Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw of Chicago.

What has privacy advocates more upset is that Ashcroft's clients "are arguably making it possible for the government to infringe on our privacy," the Trib quotes Elizabeth Garrett, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a member of President Bush's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform. Oracle makes large databases, including some used by intelligence services, and plans to use Ashcroft as a consultant for business opportunities on homeland security issues, according to a company spokesman. Clients also include ChoicePoint, a data broker that sells credit reports and other personal information to the FBI and other federal agencies, and has been criticized for security breaches discovered last year that allowed thieves to collect personal information on at least 162,000 people -- among other problems.

And what does the new lobbyist do in his spare time? "In addition to his lobbying work, Ashcroft is a law professor at Regent University, with campuses in Virginia Beach, Va., and Washington, D.C., run by televangelist Pat Robertson."