The Bush administration's purge of the Civil Rights Division has been well documented -- how career attorneys and analysts have been driven out and replaced with hard-line conservatives with little civil rights experience.
But it's not just in the Civil Rights Division that hiring practices have changed. According to a group of anonymous Justice Department employees who've penned a letter to the House and Senate judiciary committees, all possible entry-level hires at the Justice Department are now being screened by the deputy attorney general's office. And they seem to be looking for something in particular.
According to their letter, here's what happened when some of those employees sat down with Michael Elston, chief of staff to DAG Paul McNulty (both of them key figures in the U.S. attorney purge). They wanted to know why Elston's office had struck a number of promising applicants from the list of interviewees. From John Bresnahan at The Politico:
...Elston "was offensive to the point of (being) insulting."...
"Claiming that the entire group had not 'done their jobs' in reviewing applicants, (Elston) said that he had a 'screening panel' to go over the list and research these candidates on the Internet; he refused to give the names of those on his 'panel,'" the career employees wrote. "Mr. (Elston) said that people were struck from the list for three reasons: grades, spelling errors on applications and inappropriate information about them on the Internet."
So, in their own words, the career employees did some checking of their own. They reportedly detected a "common denominator" for "most of those" struck from the interview list: They had "interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a 'liberal cause' or otherwise appeared to have 'liberal' leanings. Summa cum laude graduates at both Yale and Harvard were rejected for interviews."
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