No doubt Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV rues the day that he dissed jail-house lawyers in print. The patrician Tennessee Republican who once prepped Dick Cheney for his campaign debates should have been a shoe-in for an appointment to the federal bench.. But as the general counsel of the country’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, Puryear has drawn fire from a relentless adversary in his quest for confirmation: Alex Friedmann, a former CCA inmate and one of those jail-house lawyers Puryear once bashed in an interview for allegedly filing frivolous lawsuits.
Friedmann has gotten revenge by flooding the press and the Senate Judiciary Committee with a host of negative information about Puryear, reminding the Senators of Puryear’s membership in an exclusive all white country club that doesn’t allow women to become members, among other things. The latest installment comes via the Tennessean, which reports on Friedmann’s discovery that Puryear is landlord to Nashville’s only methadone clinic, which was recently caught throwing out patient records without shredding them first, leaving all their pertinent digits in the trash for anyone to find. Puryear is only the landlord, and he’s not implicated in any misdeeds, but clearly the story can’t help his fight for confirmation, which looks dimmer and dimmer by the day.
