We now know how deeply poisoned the Justice Department is. We are now just talking about the U.S. attorney firing scandal. We are talking about the entire hiring practices in the entire Justice Department. I had posted earlier about how the faith bases initatives were implanted in certain agencies [from Bush's executive order in 2001] for a political agenda especially in the DOJ and in the OJJDP with J. Robert Flores. But, this latest opens up a huge number of criminal investigations to those current and former employees in the Justice Department.
From the Inspector General's report, this is not just Alberto Gonzales' former aides such as Monica Goodling that crossed the line in hiring practices but Mike Elston and Bill Mercer and others at DOJ crossed the line. Here's a list of the people on the working group who originally changed the hiring practices in 2002: Andrew Hruska, then Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General,Adam Ciongoli, then Counselor to the Attorney General; Paul Clement, then Principal Deputy Solicitor General; David Higbee, then Deputy Associate Attorney General; Howard Nielson, then Counselor to the Attorney General; and Christopher Wray, then Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.
More from TPM:
In today's report on bias in hiring practices at the Department of Justice, the Office of the Inspector General found Michael Elston "violated federal law" by deselecting candidates based on their liberal affiliations:
As explained below, we concluded that Elston violated federal law and Department policy by deselecting candidates based on their liberal affiliations. First, the data analysis indicates that highly qualified candidates with liberal or Democratic Party affiliations were deselected at a much higher rate than highly qualified candidates with conservative or Republican Party affiliations. Second, Elston admitted that he may have deselected candidates in a few instances due to their affiliations with certain liberal causes. From page 18 of the report (pdf).
Here is more of the selection of DOJ hiring practices:
The nomination process for attorneys had two stages. First, individual offices in DOJ reviewed applications and selected certain ones for interviews. Then, a Screening Committee selected by the deputy attorney general reviewed the selections and made nominations for final interviews. This was a change made in 2002 when the "involvement of political appointees at the Department in the hiring process was greatly expanded."
The OIG broke down nominees into those that they classified as "Liberal," "Conservative" and "Neutral."* They then evaluated the deselection (removal from the hiring process) rate of applicants from 2002 to 2007. They found a strikingly high percentage of identifiable liberals who were culled from the process compared to identifiable conservatives.
For example, in 2002, of the 100 "liberals" nominated, 80% were "deselected" by the Screening Committee. Of the 46 "conservatives" nominated, only 9% were deselected.
Chart 3 of the report (pdf) details the discrepancy:
Perhaps even more disturbing, of the 71 candidates who were deemed "Highly Qualified" (attended a top 20 ranked law school, were in the top 20% of their class and had previously held judicial clerkships and were members of the law review), 37% were deselected.
And the kicker?
15 out of the 17 highly qualified candidates who were categorized as "Liberal" were deselected. Zero of the five highly qualified "Conservative" candidates were deselected.
