Nice Work: DOJ Lawyer's Alleged Beach Gig
As a hearing loomed in a voting rights case against the city of Boston last summer, Susana Lorenzo-Giguere, a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice, came up from Washington, D.C., to oversee it personally.
But then she allegedly spent much of the summer with her family on the beach in Cape Cod, Mass., while simultaneously collecting a special per diem due to her out-of-town business travel, writes the Boston Globe. The allegations, which the DOJ is investigating, reportedly came from a complaint by a fellow Justice Department employee.
“Ms. Lorenzo-Giguere spent little time in Boston, and the trial attorneys who actually developed the factual record for the court’s July 25, 2007, hearing can identify minimal work done by Ms. Lorenzo-Giguere which required her to be in Boston,” contends the complaint. “To the extent those attorneys’ efforts were supervised or overseen by Ms. Lorenzo-Giguere, that supervision, which often took place by telephone calls placed to them in Boston while Ms. Lorenzo-Giguere remained on the beach, would have been at least as effective had Ms. Lorenzo-Giguere telephoned them from her office in Washington.”
Lorenzo-Giguere declined to comment. She is a graduate of Franklin Pierce Law Center, and reportedly has received a DOJ award for her voting-rights work.
