ATTORNEY-GENERAL HUNT GETS ABSURD

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, February 9, 1993                   TAG: 9302090360
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
ATTORNEY-GENERAL HUNT GETS ABSURD
THE STANDARD of probity for whoever is to be Bill Clinton's attorney general is fast degenerating from the arguable to the absurd.
With Zoe Baird's nomination, though mitigating details tended to get lost in the talk-show shuffle, at least her opponents had a point. But what is the flaw that derailed U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood's prospective nomination?
She, too, once hired an illegal immigrant as a babysitter - but before the law was changed to make it a civil violation to do so. As an employer, she apparently fulfilled every obligation of the law.
Wood's "sin" - apart from the ill timing of having her name pop up right after the Baird affair - was her failure to divine future public opinion and congressional will. If that's a transgression, it's shared by a lot of other people, including members of Congress.
The new administration did itself no favors by leaking word, before her vetting was completed, that Wood was the new top choice. Neither is the adminstration making points for itself in its preoccupation with the surface rather than the substance of integrity.
Nor, for that matter, by its effort to trash Wood by letting it be known that she, as a student in London decades ago, had trained for five days as a Playboy bunny. It bespeaks a double standard: If a male candidate for attorney general visited a Playboy Club, it would go unremarked.
The president's willingness to sacrifice capable candidates is worrisome, too, as a sign of inconstant overreaction to the mood of the moment. If not quite in Baird's case, then certainly in Wood's: Her jettisoning appears based solely on fear of a weekend's worth of negative p.r.
Wood represented something the Justice Department has lacked for years and now desperately needs: professional management.
After years with the likes of Ed Meese and William Barr at its head, Justice is battered. For openers, the new attorney general will have to figure out what to do about FBI Director William Sessions, accused of petty wrongdoing in a report by the department's own ethics office.
Healing the department, not illegal immigrants, should be the priority.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB