US Attorney firings: It goes deeper than we think...
Justice Department employees have written anonymously to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees complaining that the politicisation of the Justice Department is much more widespread than the Judiciary Committee appear to be aware of.
They detail how they normally put forward the names of candidates to be interviewed for vacancies to the Office of Attorney Recruitment Management. However, this year they were told that the names had to be forwarded to the Office of Deputy Attorney General.
Having forwarded the names to the Deputy Attorney General they were then shocked to discover that the list had been substantially reduced. They wanted to know why. They were eventually granted a meeting with Michael Ellston, Chief of Staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who berated them for not having "done their jobs" properly.
At first Ellston berated them for choosing candidates with low grades. When it was pointed out to him that the candidates had "excellent grades" he replied that a Harvard graduate in the bottom half of the class was preferable to a top student from a second tier law school.
Ellston then berated them for having proposed candidates who had "spelling mistakes" on their applications and for allowing candidates who had "inappropriate information about them on the internet". At which point your head starts to hurt. What is he saying? Have applicants uploaded naked pictures of themselves to Google or something?
The employees obviously found this as nonsensical as I do, so they started digging around.
When division personnel staff later compared the remaining interviewees with the candidates struck form the list, one common denominator appeared repeatedly: most of those struck form the list 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 of both Yale and Harvard were rejected for interviews.This is especially hypocritical when one remembers that the recently resigned Monica Goodling, who was the third ranking official in the Justice Department, studied law at Pat Robertson's Regent University School of Law, a fourth tier law school. Not only that, but there are a further 150 members of the Bush administration who were also educated in law at this establishment.
So we can safely say that Ellston is talking bull when he says it was their grades that made them inappropriate, especially as summa cum laude graduates from both Yale and Harvard were rejected.
Which only leaves us with their political leanings.
And as this is one of the things that Gonzales and others have specifically denied - politicising the Justice Department - I think we can safely say that they are being economical with the truth.
Click title for the letter. (PDF)
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