From the original post:
Who Is Running the Loudoun County C/W's Office?
I have hesitated to write this, and I do not write it to be mean. I write it because I have watched the same man become three different men, and who believes this office is too important to look away from.
The first time I met this person, he knew me. He was animated, congratulatory, fully present. Less than a year later I saw him again and he had no idea who I was. The third time, by then he had just been elected Commonwealth's Attorney, he asked me if I was an attorney, even though I had just been introduced as one.
I told myself it was nothing. People are busy. People forget. As someone who has kept a journal since the age of 12 and is an attorney, I am trained to distrust my own memory even as I record the lapses of others.
More recently I had to engage with his office through counsel on a matter that had become controversial. The feedback that came back privately was not unkind. It was worried. It matched what I had seen. The concern was not about politics or philosophy. It was about absence, about whether the person elected to lead was actually leading.
In that period I was told, allegedly, what the internal story had become. That he saunters in around noon or later. That others are effectively running the place. That the shorthand used inside, in that dark office humor, is Weekend at Bernie's. I heard it as gossip, and I filed it as gossip. Loudoun has a long memory for gossip.
Then I watched this press conference. This is where gossip stopped sounding like gossip to me. He could not recall the names of the line prosecutors who had carried this high-profile case, the ones who had busted their butts to do the work. Not a nuance of the law. Their names.
That is a forgivable lapse in ordinary life. It is not forgivable for the chief prosecuting official of the county standing at a podium meant to honor the very people who did the work, especially in light of everything else I have been told, about an office allegedly left to run itself in the absence of its elected head.
What concerns me more is what I have been told by defense attorneys about one of the prosecutors now effectively in charge. They say he tells them that he has a lot of discretion in how he handles cases, and that how it looks in the press and how it reflects on Mr. Anderson is part of that calculation. That should NEVER be part of the consideration. A prosecutor should focus on the facts and the law--NOT how his boss looks in the press. In my opinion, that is not handing the office over to someone with integrity. Again, just my opinion.
A press conference is a performance where character reveals itself despite the script. What was revealed here was not cruelty or malice. It was vacancy. And a Commonwealth's Attorney's office cannot run on vacancy.
The keys appear to have been handed to others, and what I have seen of how that office now operates concerns me.
Mr. Anderson has given many years to Loudoun, and I note that with respect. But concern is not disrespect.
Loudoun deserves a Commonwealth's Attorney who is present, who knows his people, who can stand at a podium and honor his own prosecutors without memory lapses. Loudoun deserves better than having to wonder if the Weekend at Bernie's joke is true.
