Report Concludes Bush's Justice Department Engaged In Illegal Practices

Aides to Alberto Gonzales broke Civil Service laws by using political affiliation to decide who to hire rather than concentrating on the competence of the candidates in question.

A longtime prosecutor who drew rave reviews from his supervisors was passed over for an important counterterrorism slot because his wife was active in Democratic politics, and a much-less-experienced lawyer with Republican leanings got the job, the report said.

Another prosecutor was rejected for a job in part because she was thought to be a lesbian. And a Republican lawyer received high marks at his job interview because he was found to be sufficiently conservative on the core issues of “god, guns + gays.”

The report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general and its internal ethics office, centered on the misconduct of a small circle of aides to Mr. Gonzales, including Monica Goodling, a former top adviser to the attorney general, and Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff. It also found that White House officials were actively involved in some hiring decisions.

As this staggeringly partisan and incompetent administration moves into it's final months in office, only a fool could express any surprise at findings like this. And, as is to be expected from an administration that hired 150 graduates from Pat Robertson's Regent University, political affiliation was always going to come before any actual talent.

According to the report, officials at the White House first developed a method of searching the Internet to glean the political leanings of a candidate and introduced it at a White House seminar called The Thorough Process of Investigation. Justice Department officials then began using the technique to search for key phrases or words in an applicant’s background, like “abortion,” “homosexual,” “Florida recount,” or “guns.”

The White House has been run for the past eight years by nutcases, by ridiculous ideologues, so findings like this are only conforming what many of us previously suspected.

The report released on Monday goes much further in documenting pervasive evidence of political hiring for some of the department’s most senior career positions, including immigration judges, assistant United States attorneys and even senior counterterrorism positions.

The pattern appeared most damaging in the hiring of immigration judges, as vacancies were allowed to go unfilled — and a backlog of deportation cases grew — while Mr. Gonzales’s aides looked for conservative lawyers to fill what were supposed to be apolitical jobs.

The inspector general’s investigation found that Ms. Goodling and a handful of other senior aides to Mr. Gonzales used in-person interviews and Internet searches to screen out candidates who might be too liberal and identify candidates seen as pro-Republican and supportive of President Bush.

Apparently they can't even be prosecuted for what they have done, although there is hope that Goodling and others might face disciplinary action from their local bar associations, including the possible loss of their bar licenses.

Stopping people like this from ever practicing law again would seem to be the least that could be asked for under the circumstances.

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Tags: Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzales, Justice Department