Scandal Spotlights Regent University Law School

For instance:

Terry Gross: "...How does Regent connect to the larger story of changes in the Justice Department and the firing and replacing of U.S. Attorneys?"
Charlie Savage: "Regent University School of Law connects to the U.S. attorney firings and replacement affair in two ways.  The first way is through the person of Monica Goodling, the former Justice Department liaison to the White House, who played a central role in helping evaluate which U.S. attorneys ought to be fired and who they ought to be replaced with, and who was in regular communication with the White House, notably the office of Karl Rove during this process.  She later resigned."

"The second way in which Regent University connects to the scandal is in its unusual success in placing graduates, both of the law school and of the larger university, in government jobs of influence.  Under the Bush Administration, this university as a whole has placed at least 150 of its graduates into government jobs... And that's interesting because Regent itself is a very new university, it's a school that is still struggling to build an academic reputation, its law school is ranked as a Tier 4 school by U.S. News and World Reports, which is the lowest possible score.  And it's not the kind of place that you would normally suspect that many many many graduates would find success at the upper reaches.  Part of the U.S. attorney hiring and firing affair has been this larger question, accusations of politicization at the Justice Department...under the Bush Administration, which critics charge have placed ideology and partisan credentials above qualifications...when deciding who should be filling these powerful positions of government responsibility."

Listen to the whole thing here. It's very troubling.

P.S. For more on Regent, Monica Goodling, and our old friend Bob McDonnell, see here.

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