“I was forced out of my job at the Justice Department, fired from my subsequent private sector job at the government’s behest, placed under criminal investigations, referred to the state bars in which I’m licensed as an attorney, and put on the ‘no-fly’ list. I have spent $100,000 defending against a criminal investigation that was dropped and a bar charge that was dismissed. The D.C. Bar Complaint is still pending after two years and despite the fact that I was elected to the D.C. Bar’s Legal Ethics Committee.”

From Mother Jones:
Motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/11/bush_body_count.html

Position: Ethics Advisor, U.S. Department of Justice Professional Responsibility Advisory Office
Tenure: 1995 to 2002

Jesselyn Radack graduated near the top of her class at Brown University and went on to Yale Law School. Upon graduation in 1995, she was chosen for the Justice Department’s prestigious Honor Program. As an advisor on legal ethics for the Justice Department’s Professional Responsibility Office in 2001, she advised FBI prosecutors against interrogating John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” without counsel. However, the FBI had already done just that. Radack then advised that the interview “may have to be sealed or only used for national security purposes.”

The circumstances of Lindh’s confession became a pivotal issue during the trial and the judge ordered the Justice Department to turn over all documents pertaining to it. When Radack realized that only three of her many e-mails were included, she recovered the missing e-mails with the help of technical staff. Because of the methods used to obtain the confession, the government would eventually drop the most serious charges against Lindh.

Shortly after she began raising her concerns about the Lindh case, Radack received a scathing performance review following years of glowing feedback. Radack had thought she would spend her entire career at Justice, but she was presented with the choice of finding a new job or having the negative performance review placed in her file. She left in 2002 for private practice.

After some of her e-mails showed up in articles on the Lindh case by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, government agents came calling at her new law firm, telling her superiors she was under criminal investigation. When the government demanded phone and e-mail records, the firm put her on paid, then unpaid leave.

Since that time, Jesselyn Radack has worked with the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Treatment of Enemy Combatants and served on the Legal Ethics Committee of the D.C. Bar, in addition to teaching and writing about legal ethics.