The Hill notes yesterday's recess appointment of James Cole to a Deputy Attorney General position:

Cole's nomination to the second-ranking post at the Department of Justice had been held over objections from Republicans, who raised concerns over his tenure as an independent monitor of insurance giant AIG between 2005 and 2009. The federal government bailed out the company in 2008. Republican senators also quibbled with a 2002 report that Cole wrote advocating civilian trials for terror suspects. The GOP has objected to trials in civilian courts for any of the detainees held in Guantánamo Bay as well as others accused of acts of terror. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attempted to confirm Cole by unanimous consent during the lame-duck session, but GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) objected.

And of course, Republicans with bigger mouths (but no vote in the matter) have more spectacular thoughts about Cole:

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the incoming chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, has angrily denounced President Obama’s recess appointment of James Cole as deputy attorney general. King called Cole’s appointment “absolutely shocking” and said it might be one of the worst appointments Obama will make during his presidency. “I strongly oppose the recess appointment of James Cole to lead the national security team at the Department of Justice,” King said in a statement. “The appointment indicates that the Obama Administration continues to try to implement its dangerous policies of treating Islamic terrorism as a criminal matter.”

Unstated, for some reason, among the Republican objections is something else James Cole treats as a criminal matter: corruption among public officials. In particular, some Republican ones:

Cole, [then] 44, was chosen for the sensitive post of outside counsel to the ethics subcommittee investigating Gingrich after assuring Republicans that he would be unafraid to go easy on the speaker if the evidence warranted. But as the months went by, he found evidence of a distinctly different kind. It was he who collected and first analyzed enough of it, in documents and interviews, to force Gingrich last month to take the painful and long-resisted step of publicly admitting that he had brought discredit on the House. And Friday it was he who recommended what penalties should be imposed. Given the political stakes, it was not surprising that the committee, made up of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, would resort to bitter partisanship at the hearing. But even as the members hurled accusations at one another, no one -- notably no Republicans -- suggested that Cole's approach had been unfair.

Cole was the guy who unraveled the hidden, interlocking network of non-profits used by disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich (popularly referred to as "Newt, Inc.") to finance a jet-setting political lifestyle that, once revealed, forced him from office and brought down a $300,000 fine on his head.

With Gingrich thinking himself sufficiently rehabilitated to run for president -- even while still engaged in his favorite fundraising hucksterism -- it couldn't hurt to have someone around in a prominent position at the Justice Department who knows him as well as Cole does.