I don’t think I’ve been surprised to the upside about anything that Obama has ever done, but this comes the closest:

President Obama will renominate Dawn Johnsen to serve as one of the Justice Department’s top officials, TPMDC has learned.

A White House official confirms that Obama will renominate Johnsen, along with a handful of others whose nominations expired at the end of the year, when the Senate reconvenes later this month.

I don’t see how she gets a vote this time either, but I guess it’s always possible that the White House will decide to actually get off their asses and apply some pressure.

Compare and contrast Johnsen to the handling of Tim Geithner, who proved himself corrupt and captured by Wall Street during the Lehman disaster, and then had to admit to cheating on his taxes during his confirmation. The administration was certainly able to keep his nomination on track, and isn’t even flinching now that Geithner has been exposed again protecting the interests of Wall Street at the expense of people who actually do pay their taxes:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008.

This is now not just corruption, it’s criminal. And if this pair of nominations doesn’t say it all about this administration, what does?