In the half-dozen columns I have written about the rise and fall of Rachel Paulose, the well-connected and poorly prepared U.S. attorney for Minnesota, I have examined how her appointment was part of the campaign by the Bush administration to fill the Justice Department with partisans loyal to personal and political agendas, not the public interest.

From the beginning, circumstances, including the clumsy whiting out of names on a hit list of prosecutors targeted for replacement by Bush operatives, suggested that Minnesota's veteran U.S. attorney, Tom Heffelfinger, was among the targets of a campaign to turn Justice into a Bush law office.

Heffelfinger, a moderate Republican, resigned and returned to private practice in time to escape the ax being sharpened for him in 2006. That opened the way for the appointment of Paulose, 32, who had herself installed in a fancy opera bouffe ceremony, but whose credentials were thin: She was a member of the hard-right Federalist Society, and a friend of the pious and political Monica Goodling, the Justice Department Dragon Lady with a penchant for promoting her friends to high places.

The Paulose reign -- which lasted 20 months until her resignation in January -- offers a textbook case for anyone wishing to study the dangers of letting justice be placed in the hands of people whose interest is protecting their own falling house of cards, rather than serving a sense of impartial, fair-minded justice for all.

Any doubt that Heffelfinger was a marked man was erased in September with the release of an investigative report concluding that he had been targeted for removal. The reasons, as preposterous as they were transparent, were that he was too interested in American Indian legal issues (he had been asked by the first Bush attorney general, John Ashcroft, to head a committee on Indian issues) and that he was "weak."

"Weak" apparently means unwilling to serve as a political hatchet man for Alberto Gonzales, who succeeded Ashcroft and turned the Department of Justice into a Federalist Society frat party. The purge that pushed out Heffelfinger and other government lawyers targeted some because they were rumored to be lesbian, or they were considered soft on guns, on gays or on Clintons, or too aggressive in protecting spotted owls. Heffelfinger in June described this debauched Department of Justice as being like a high school but, in fact, it was worse: It was a cult that believed the government belonged to it, not the people.

Veterans of the Minnesota office -- people such as Doug Kelley, a Republican who once headed the white-collar criminal section -- say that it used to be proudly nonpartisan and that the public's lawyers checked their politics at the door. When Heffelfinger left, he recommended his top assistant as his replacement. But she was a Democrat and was passed over for Paulose. Favoritism, recriminations and turmoil soon followed. The mess is still being cleaned up.

Wednesday, the government's Office of Special Counsel put another nail in this reign of incompetence and petulance, releasing a finding that Paulose wrongly retaliated against her first assistant attorney, John Marti. He had reported to the appropriate authorities that Paulose routinely left classified reports on her desk, ignoring rules that required them to be safely secured. Paulose responded -- violating a law protecting employees who report wrongdoing -- by trying to remove Marti from his job. In the end, Marti accepted a demotion -- along with other top aides upset by Paulose's mercurial micromanaging style. Now, Marti will get back pay and a lump sum cash payment.

Call it a Paulose Penalty, the price for an experiment in Justice run by amateurs.

"It is a real black eye," Heffelfinger said Wednesday. "It was an unprecedented politicization, and she was put in place by the people responsible for [the political firings of] the other attorneys. You wouldn't want your performance as U.S. attorney defined by that press release," he said, referring to Wednesday's report. "That's a very sad statement."

It was a sad time for the administration of justice in Minnesota, too -- a time when extremism in ideology and policy ruled the day and almost ruined a government of laws, not friends. History will show that this pernicious effort began, at least in part, in Minnesota.

It is fitting, then, that it should end here as well.

ncoleman@startribune.com • 612-673-4400