Most Recent Posts

Read Gary Rivlin's Article For 'The Nation'

"How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank"

Read Gary Rivlin's Article For 'The Nation'

"How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank"

In the end, it wasn't even that close.

Republican Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor whose political career seemed to end in ignominy in 2010, capped a remarkable political comeback Tuesday by defeating Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, 54 percent to 45 percent.

His victory in a Charleston-area House special election came despite Republican worries that the taint surrounding his highly publicized extramarital affair — and unflattering recent publicity concerning a February trespassing incident involving his former wife — would be too much to overcome.

The dramatic arc of the former two-term governor's narrative made him seem like an updated version of a Robert Penn Warren character: He started as a youthful reformer and outsider, then rose to prominence as a Southern governor with an eye toward the presidency.

But that was before his career unraveled before the nation in 2009. Sanford was forced to admit to an affair with an Argentine mistress after first claiming to be hiking on the Appalachian Trail. His situation was compounded by a rambling and emotional press conference that was televised nationwide.

A humbled Sanford, who referred to himself in the special election campaign as "a wounded warrior," recognized the hurdles he faced in his bid for redemption. While he wasn't a prime combatant in the culture wars during his three House terms in the 1990s, in a conservative state like South Carolina his public betrayal of his wife and political partner, the state's popular first lady Jenny Sanford, left him an unsympathetic character.

"I think you can go back in and you can ask for a second chance in a political sense once," he told The Associated Press on Tuesday after casting his ballot.

Early polling in the Republican-oriented district suggested the party's nomination of a flawed candidate might prove to be another squandered opportunity at a time when the GOP is struggling with its identity. But late polls suggested a surge in support for Sanford, whose fiscal conservatism was in line with the district's thinking, over Colbert Busch, the sister of TV comedian Stephen Colbert.

In the end, voters proved willing to give Sanford a second chance — according to unofficial election returns, he carried all five counties that make up the 1st Congressional District.

In doing so, Sanford not only resuscitated his own career, but also gave hope to a legion of disgraced former politicians — among them former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat who's considering a bid for New York mayor just two years after resigning his congressional seat in a sexual scandal.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Ignacia Moreno, the point person at the Justice Department for prosecuting environmental crimes, says she will leave government service next month.

Moreno, the first Latina to lead the department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in November 2009. Her tenure spanned one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010. Eleven men died in that firestorm. The Justice Department extracted a record $1 billion civil penalty from Transocean, the rig owner, earlier this year. And a civil trial continues in New Orleans over other environmental damages.

"To date, we have already achieved significant resolutions for liability in the Gulf," Moreno said in an exit interview with NPR. "We are focused on holding those responsible accountable to the fullest extent of the law."

The unit also successfully defended Obama administration regulations of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, winning a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year.

But veterans of the environmental unit worried it had lost some prestige by ceding ground in the massive Gulf oil spill case to the Justice Department's criminal division, which led a federal task force and prosecuted giant BP and several individual employees in connection with the disaster.

"However it looks on the outside, we have all worked very closely together ... in making sure we do right by the people of the Gulf," Moreno said.

Moreno plans to spend the summer with her 12-year-old son before looking for opportunities in the private sector.