Report: Justice appointee sought to purge liberals

WASHINGTON — A former senior official at the Justice Department routinely hired Republicans, Federalist Society members and "RTAs" — "Right-Thinking Americans" — for what were supposed to be nonpolitical posts and gave them plum assignments on civil-rights cases, an internal department report released Tuesday said.

The former official, Bradley Schlozman, who helped lead the Civil Rights Division for about three years beginning in 2003, also gave false statements to Congress when he denied factoring politics into hiring decisions, according to the report from the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department.

But federal prosecutors last week declined to bring criminal charges against Schlozman, who left the department in 2007 amid an uproar over accusations of widespread politicization.

In the Civil Rights Division, regarded as a cornerstone of the Justice Department since the days of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the investigation found that political supervisors charged with enforcing federal bias laws had illegally discriminated against job applicants perceived to be too liberal. The report said Schlozman's superiors had ignored warnings about his brash management style and his political agenda.

A lawyer for Schlozman, William Jordan, called the report "inaccurate, incomplete, biased, unsupported by the law and contrary to the facts," and said "the so-called investigation was a Star Chamber-type inquiry from the start."

The investigation grew out of the controversy in 2007 over the dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys, including Seattle's John McKay, which led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and spurred accusations that the White House had allowed political ideology to trump law-enforcement decisions.

The report goes beyond the conclusions of three previous internal Justice Department inquiries in exposing the depths of political interference with personnel decisions. The conclusions of the latest inquiry, the first to focus on the Civil Rights Division, are likely to figure in the Senate hearing Thursday for Eric Holder's confirmation as attorney general.

The report makes its case against Schlozman in his words, drawn from e-mail and voice-mail messages to colleagues and underlings, as he 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 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."

When a colleague reported that he had been given an office next to a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal-affairs group, Schlozman responded in an e-mail: "Just between you and me, we hired another member of 'the team' yesterday. And still another ideological comrade will be starting in one month. So we are making progress."

The report found that Schlozman had selected conservative lawyers for prime assignments and transferred three lawyers out of the Civil Rights Division because they were seen as liberals opposed to his political agenda. All three later brought federal discrimination claims and returned to the division after Schlozman left. The transfers, the report said, violated federal civil-service law and "constituted misconduct."

The investigation found that, among people hired by Schlozman, 63 of 65 were considered Republican or conservative, but that when he was not involved, "the results were more balanced," with conservatives and liberals split about evenly.

"Bitch slapping a bunch of (these) attorneys really did get the blood pumping and was even enjoyable once in a while," Schlozman wrote when he left for a temporary appointment as a U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo.

The investigators for the inspector-general and the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that Schlozman's repeated denials to the Senate in 2007 that he had used ideological considerations in his personnel decisions constituted a "false statement," and they referred the matter to prosecutors for criminal prosecution last year.

Jordan, Schlozman's lawyer, said that the investigators' data on hiring decisions were flawed and that Schlozman had been joking in many of his e-mails, with the true meaning taken out of context.

Jordan also noted that prosecutors had declined to bring criminal charges against his client, now practicing private law in his native Kansas. Jordan said Schlozman was "incredibly happy that the U.S. Attorney's Office — which actually has standards they go by — made the determination not to go forward."

Details from the Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times archives are included in this report.