On April 1, 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft appointed Carl J. Truscott to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Truscott was an experienced Secret Service Agent, with many awards to his record. Unfortunately, he turned out to be another disaster of an appointment.

The former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives authorized hundreds of thousands of dollars of questionable expenditures on a new ATF headquarters, personal security and other items, and he violated ethics rules by ordering 20 employees to help his nephew prepare a high school video project, according to an exhaustive report released today.

Carl J. Truscott, who previously served as head of President Bush’s security detail at the Secret Service, also took several questionable trips with excessive numbers of accompanying ATF agents, including a $37,000 journey to London in September 2005 accompanied by eight other ATF employees, according to the report.

Truscott also ordered two female administrative staffers to prepare meals for visiting guests and required one of the employees to announce, “Lunch is served.”

You can pray for Truscott here (scroll down). You can also pray for him here (scroll down). On a topical note, he is a member of the board for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Heckuva job.