Legal News

The DOJ?s Civil Rights Division: ?Adherents of Mao Need Not Apply?

By Dan Slater

There’s a good chance that the culture of political meddling at Alberto Gonzales’s Department of Justice will result in no criminal prosecutions. To wit: In August, AG Michael Mukasey, referring to alleged wrongdoing by Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson and others linked to the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, said, “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.” In September, the DOJ declined to refer Gonzales to a grand jury for his alleged role in the U.S. Attorney Mess.

Bradley Schlozman, the former U.S. attorney in Kansas City, is sworn in to testify before the Senate Judiciary committee, June 5, 2007. (AP/Susan Walsh)

And, last week, prosecutors decided not to bring criminal charges against Bradley Schlozman, who left the department in 2007 over accusations of politicization in the Civil Rights Division. Schlozman, however, left behind some fairly good fodder for Gonzales’s memoir, should he choose to use it.

An internal department report released yesterday said that Schlozman hired Republicans, Federalist Society members and “R.T.A.’s” — “Right-Thinking Americans”— for what were supposed to be nonpolitical posts and gave them plum assignments on civil rights cases. The report also found that Schlozman, who helped lead the Civil Rights Division for about three years beginning in 2003, gave false statements to Congress when he denied factoring politics into his hiring decisions. Here are stories from the NYT and the WSJ; and here’s the DOJ report.

Schlozman’s lawyer, William Jordan, called the report “inaccurate, incomplete, biased, unsupported by the law and contrary to the facts,” and said that “the so-called investigation was a Star Chamber-type inquiry from the start.”

Drawn from e-mail and voice mail messages to colleagues, the report documents how Schlozman talked about reshaping the political makeup of the Civil Rights Division and doing away with “pinko” and “crazy lib” lawyers and others he did not consider “real Americans.”

In one e-mail message regarding a pool of job applicants, he wrote that “as long as I’m here, adherents of Mao’s Little Red Book need not apply.”

In a 2003 voice-mail message to a colleague, Schlozman said experience in civil rights law was not needed to work for the division. “‘I just want to make sure we don’t start confining ourselves to, you know, Politburo members because they happen to be a member of some, you know, psychopathic left-wing organization designed to overthrow the government,” he said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 14, 2009 (boomark / email).