Pete King's hearings this week on radicalization inside the Muslim community have triggered months of advance criticism from skeptics who often compare the hearings to Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts, and a reader yesterday turned up an interesting historical note on that point: King actually worked with McCarthy counsel Roy Cohn when he was a young lawyer.

"It was amazing to me the network of contacts he had," King told the AP in 1986, when he was Nassau County Comptroller. "He seemed to have access anywhere -- FBI agents, prominent senators, and the State Department. There seemed to be nobody he didn't know."

King confimed to me just now that he worked with Cohn for about 18 months at the firm Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, where Cohn maintained an extremely aggressive private practice. King didn't have much to say about Cohn, but he dismissed the historical reference.

"I've been surprised by the fanaticism of the atacks against me," he said. As soon as the news of his planned hearings broke last fall, "immediately it was 'McCarthyism,' 'Japanese internment camps,' 'bigotry,' ' racism.'"