No 'Wackos' Allowed

If you're considered a "wacko," a "wack job," or a liberal, the Justice Department in 2006 likely had no interest in you working at the agency.

The Justice Department's inspector general today released a report that found that the DOJ, under President Bush, inappropriately injected politics into hiring programs. Problems were found in hiring practices during 2002 - when John Ashcroft was attorney general - and in 2006, under Alberto Gonzales. 2006 was apparently full of many more flagrant violations of the law and department policy.

"We found that in 2006 the Screening Committee inappropriately used political and ideological considerations to deselect many candidates," the report states.

The AP has a quick hit on the report, which said members of a screening committee were asked to weed out "wackos" and ideological "extremists" trying to get accepted into a competitive honors program for entry-level attorneys or as summer interns. The committee rejected applicants with liberal or Democratic affiliations at a much higher rate than those with Republican, conservative or politically neutral backgrounds. AP notes that one candidate, a top Harvard student fluent in Arabic, was put in a "questionable" category evidently because of his membership in the Council on American Islamic Relations.

This only adds fuel to the fire still blazing over the U.S. attorney firings, for which several officials, including Gonzales, are still under investigation.

Some juicy highlights of inappropriateness I picked out of the report after the jump.-In 2006, Associate Deputy Attorney General Michael Elston (a then-political appointee who resigned in 2007), chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, was chosen to lead the screening process. The report found that he didn't do enough to prevent the use of politics in the selection process and that he himself even rejected some candidates based on "impermissible considerations." Elston claims there was no specific criteria used

-Elston acknowledged that in the spring of 2007, when allegations surfaced that Monica Goodling - who served as senior counsel to Gonzales and as DOJ's liaison to the White House - used politics in the hiring career immigration judges, "I had in the back of my mind the concern that, that some of those same things were at work in the Honors Program in hindsight" and he was concerned there was "political stuff going on"and that the program may have been "Monica-ized."

-Elston could not explain why some highly qualified liberal or Democrat applicants hadn't been selected

-According to Daniel Fridman, a DOJ official who worked on the screening, Elston told him his job was to weed out "wackos" or "wack jobs" (it's never explained what exactly Elston meant by a "wack job.")

-Report: "Elston stated that because this was the Attorney General's Honors Program, they wanted to hire candidates who were supportive of or who had views consistent with the Attorney General's views on law enforcement."

-Fridman noted one candidate had written a law review article about the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and that another screener - Esther Slater McDonald, who was interviewed by Goodling and hired as a political appointee as counsel to Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer but resigned in October 2007 after being contacted by investigators - noted on the application that she perceived that view point to be "contradictory to the position of the administration

-McDonald flagged for concern candidates who had worked for the American Constitution Society, clerked for a liberal judge or liberal Congress member, or for a liberal law school professor.

-McDonald rejected 3 specific candidates based on her objections to their ideological affiliations, and considered one candidate's essay "leftist," according to a Nov. 29, 2006 e-mail cited in the report.

-Another candidate whose grammar stunk got a boost from McDonald, who said: "In her favor, she refers to wanting to work for DOJ to fulfill her goal of 'enforcing the law.' Leftists usually refer to achieving 'social justice' or 'making policy' or anything else that involves legislating rather than enforcing."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in a statement that the report "confirms our findings and our fears that the same senior Department officials involved with the firing of United States Attorneys were injecting improper political motives into the process of hiring young attorneys."

I suspect further reports from the Inspector General will continue to shed light on the extent to which the Bush administration has allowed politics to affect – and infect – the Department's priorities, from law enforcement to the operation of the crucial Civil Rights Division to the Department's hiring practices."