Charlie Savage Does It Again

Say what you will about the Globe‘s declining sphere of influence, the local broadsheet yesterday forced the hand of the Bush administration in a stunner of a development.

The paper’s legal affairs/DC reporter Charlie Savage, best known for winning the Pulitzer for his reporting on Bush‘s sneaky “signing statements,” and for this book, broke a story Saturday about a White House gambit to essentially politicize the supposedly independent JAG corps.

But after Savage’s story, and the outrage it roiled, the administration, which has never seen a check on its power it didn’t want to destroy, was forced to back away.

For all the totally righteous grousing we do about the current Globe, we can’t deny that Marty Baron‘s decision to recruit Savage from the Miami Herald, where Baron was executive editor, was a masterstroke that seems to pay off on a weekly basis. Bravo.