I read with interest Mark Binker’s N&R article on Judge Anna Mills Wagoner, who apparently was indanger of getting canned by the Bush administration. The article in the print edition goes into more detail than this online version, but there are still some curious omissions.
Binker quotes various officials supporting Wagoner, including State Supreme Court Judge Robert Holt Edmunds, who served as a U.S. attorney in the Middle District from 1986 to 1993. Binker provides this background:
Edmunds was appointed by President Reagan and recommended for the job by then-Sen. Jesse Helms.
“I got precisely two calls from Sen Helms. The first was when he called to tell me he was nominating me,” Edmunds recalled. Seven years later, President Clinton came to office and set about appointing new U.S. attorneys to replace those left from the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies. “Then he (Helms) called to say so long.”
That’s kind of a roundabout way of saying Edmunds was caught up President Clinton’s mass firing of U.S. attorneys in 1993, isn’t it? Such an account kind of plays along with the liberal perception that Clinton’s action wasn’t politically motivated, the way I read it.
Then there’s this paragraph:
There have been several high-profile corruption investigations in North Carolina during the past year, including the prosecution of a Democrat who served as House speaker. Although those cases appear to involve actual wrongdoing, questions about whether prosecutions are politically motivated could damage the system, experts say.
That “Democrat” would be Jim Black, right? And there certainly was more than an appearance of wrongdoing in his case, was there not?
Hey, I’m not picking on Binker just for the hell of it. I think he’s a pretty fair and balanced reporter who also does a good job on Capital Beat. He just left this reader hanging a little a bit, and that’s exactly how bias is perceived in supposedly objective news stories.
