Judge Mukasey and the Justice Department

My latest column can be read over at the Legal Intelligencer. Here is the lede:

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has resigned his position, and President Bush has now nominated Judge Michael Mukasey to take over a department in disarray.

Mukasey, recently retired from the Southern District of New York, would be stepping into the Justice Department at perhaps its most controversial moment, with significant concerns still being raised about inappropriate politicization of U.S. attorney investigations and the Justice Department as a whole, stalled congressional inquiries, unfulfilled document requests, and embarrassingly strained arguments from government lawyers defending torture, indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, and illegal wiretapping and electronic surveillance.

Gonzalez has left the Justice Department in a state of disrepair, and Congress would do well to ask Mukasey many deep, probing questions about his position on that legacy.