The Bush Administration has quietly nominated another hard-liner with a questionable past to a high level position in Washington: veteran Justice Department official Karen Tandy, the likely new chief of the Drug Enforcement Agency, who recently made headlines by conducting an aggressive series of federal raids against medical marijuana users in states where the practice has been legalized.
A recent investigation by The Nation‘s Jason Vest found Tandy’s career to be rife with examples of prosecutorial zealotry. She began her career in the 1980s as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, in an office described at the time by US District Court Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr., as “absolutely the worst” he had seen. Tandy was the cause of much of the dissatisfaction directed at the office.
In a 1984 case against alleged marijuana traffickers, she read sealed documents protected by attorney-client privilege; in 1994 she ordered the seizure of the property of North Carolina businessman John Wheeler to force him to testify against others despite a lack of any evidence against him. In both cases, she was strongly rebuked by a federal judge for her conduct.
On July 10, Tandy breezed through her confirmation hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee, with only Senator Richard Durbin going on record to oppose her nomination.
But it’s not too late to raise questions before a vote to confirm her. Click here to let your Senator know that you’re concerned about Karen Tandy’s record and that you oppose her nomination as Administrator of the DEA.
