The Justice Department is moving 250 jobs in its main legal training center from Washington to South Carolina, officials announced.
The department has signed a 20-year lease with the University of South Carolina in Columbia and will move staff from current headquarters in D.C. farther south, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden announced.
The government needs some four years to renovate the newly leased space. The deal, announced Monday, expands Justice’s $20 million National Advocacy Center, main training ground for the government’s lawyers.
Employees won’t be forced to make the move, spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said.
“No one is losing their jobs,” she told The Examiner. “We’ll find everyone a spot if they need it.”
The Justice Department has been scrambling after it was revealed that prosecutors withheld critical evidence in their prosecution of then-Senator Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. Stevens was convicted of corruption, narrowly lost his re-election bid while appealing the conviction and then was “cleared” of wrongdoing because of prosecutorial misconduct. Attorney General Eric Holder has promised to revamp the training regimen.
Schmaler said Monday’s announcement wasn’t related to the Stevens debacle, but some government lawyers speculated that the long-planned training center dovetails with Holder’s goal of reworking training for the nation’s nearly 100,000 federal lawyers.
Most of D.C.’s federal prosecutors are trained in-house at the U.S. Attorney’s office. Federal prosecutors, civil and appellate lawyers will be routinely sent to South Carolina for training.
The move, which officials have dubbed “the Palmetto Project” after the state’s nickname, was a longtime goal of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who praised the Obama administration for helping to clear key hurdles quickly.
“This has happened at, really, warp speed time for the federal government,” Graham told The Associated Press at a news conference Monday in Columbia. “The new administration picked up where the old administration left off.”
It’s not clear how much the lease will cost taxpayers. Officials said Monday it will take four years to renovate the space for “state of the art” mock courtrooms and classrooms. Justice officials say the government will save about $43 million for the next 20 years.
