Gov. Phil Murphy's staff didn't need to conduct a "legal review" before giving Marcellus Jackson a $70,000-a-year patronage job in the state Department of Education.

A simple Google search would have sufficed.

In a matter of minutes, the Murphy legal team would have quickly discovered details of Jackson's earlier life of public service, as a Passaic city councilman, sitting in the back seat of an informant's car in Newark, taking a $6,000 bribe.

"I appreciate it, baby,” Mr. Jackson said after taking the cash, according to a federal complaint filed in 2007 that would eventually help send him to prison. “Good things is gonna happen.”

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If Murphy's team did, in fact, do a legal review — we have yet to see any details — apparently it was a pretty shoddy one, which Attorney General Gurbir Grewal made abundantly clear Friday night.

In a fairly terse news release, Grewal cited a state law that permanently barred Jackson from holding public office. And Grewal — not the governor's office — noted that Jackson had also "tendered his resignation."

It was a remarkable turn of events. It's the first time in recent memory that an attorney general publicly contradicted the governor. Typically, an attorney general is there to wipe away the eggs splattered on the governor's face, or to take steps to prevent the splattering from happening.

This time, Grewal rejected the mop-up duty and heaped another pile of eggs onto Murphy's mug.

And it's a mess of Murphy's own making.

Murphy had vigorously defended Jackson since Politico New Jersey first reported the hiring. He cast Jackson as the hero of a redemption narrative, a Horatio Alger with a rap sheet, who had admitted his mistakes, had paid his debt to society and was deserving of a second chance. Murphy extended the hand of help, turning a campaign aide into a special assistant in the Education Department's Office of Civic and Social Engagement.

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"Marcellus has done all of the above, and I think we should all accept that that should be the new norm going forward," Murphy said Sept. 18.

Murphy praised Jackson for doing a "heck of a job," and added, "We have to get these folks back up on their feet in society in this state." And an Education Department spokesman said Jackson recently coordinated a meeting with more than 100 religious leaders to "gather their insights and discuss statewide education initiatives."

But as Grewal made clear, the public payroll does not offer second chances to public officials who violated the public trust. The law is pretty clear about that. Murphy administration officials declined to comment Monday.

Grewal also pointed out that the law requires the state attorney general or the county prosecutor to file an application to bar convicted former officials like Jackson from working in government. But in Jackson's case, that was not done 11 years ago. As a result, Murphy administration officials saw no official paperwork on file informing them that Jackson was barred from public work.

Grewal is investigating how that happened as well as looking into the possibility that other convicted felons may have also slipped through.

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But the real issue here is Murphy's attempt to cloak an old-fashioned campaign hire under the warm-and-fuzzy redemption narrative.

The public has become more supportive of second chances as the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s has proved to be an abject failure. It has ruined the lives of a generation of mostly African-American and Hispanic men with needlessly harsh and inflexible penalties.

There has been a bipartisan drive in Congress in recent years to reform the federal criminal justice system. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie essentially dismantled the state's bail system on the grounds that it unfairly forced low-income, first-time offenders to languish in jail just because they couldn't post bail.

And Murphy has insisted that any new law legalizing marijuana for recreational use include a provision that would allow for the swift expungement, or erasing, of past marijuana-related offenses.

But the new redemptive spirit was never meant to include corrupt public officials. Sure, they should be given a second chance to find new careers and provide for their family after they fulfilled the terms of their punishment, but not with a public job financed by taxpayers' money, argues Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi, R-River Vale.

Jackson lost that privilege of public service in 2007 when he was among 11 officials nabbed in Operation Broken Boards, an undercover sting that began in the Board of Education in Pleasantville, a small town outside of Atlantic City, and spread to Passaic and Essex counties.

It was one of the big, headline-grabbing busts orchestrated by Christie, then the United States attorney for New Jersey, who would launch his campaign for governor 14 months later.

Between January and August 2007, Jackson accepted more than $26,000 in bribes from investigators posing as officials from a sham company seeking the city of Passaic's insurance business, authorities said at the time.

Jackson pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of interstate commerce by extortion and was sentenced to 25 months in prison. He was released in July 2011, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Grewal, who has aggressively carried out Murphy's push-back on Trump administration policies, is also a former federal prosecutor who helped convict notorious cyber-criminals.

He has a reputation as being a stickler for detail and insists that while he consults the governor on policies, he operates independently on criminal matters. Just last month, Grewal created a new public integrity unit that seeks to reinvigorate the state's war on corruption, which, ironically, was largely dormant under Christie's watch.

But Grewal also showed himself in this case to be politically savvy. While his news release may have publicly embarrassed Murphy, he also bailed him out of a brewing political mess. A new bill banning convicted public officials from government jobs is moving swiftly through the Legislature with bipartisan support.

That bill might very well have landed on Murphy's desk, putting him in the humiliating position of being pressured to sign a reform directed at one of his own hires. Grewal's announcement is likely to sideline the effort by reminding the public that the ban already exists.

Murphy traveled to Nutley on Monday to unveil his new "vision" for economic growth at the former Hoffman-La Roche plant, surrounded by business lobbyists and his Democratic supporters.

"New Jersey will once again be a visionary leader in our national and global economy, period," Murphy told the crowd. He left without taking questions about the old tradition of the past of rewarding campaign workers with public jobs — even those barred from taking them.