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Congress Considers Broadening Justice Department Inquiry Sunday 06 May 2007 Washington - Congressional investigators are beginning to focus on accusations that a top civil rights official at the Justice Department illegally hired lawyers based on their political affiliations, especially for sensitive voting rights jobs. Two former department lawyers told McClatchy Newspapers that Bradley Schlozman, a senior civil rights official, told them in early 2005, after spotting mention of their Republican affiliations on their job applications, to delete those references and resubmit their resumes. Both attorneys were hired. One of them, Ty Clevenger, said: "He wanted to make it look like it was apolitical." Schlozman did not respond to phone calls to his home Sunday. But he denied the allegations in an earlier phone interview with McClatchy Newspapers and through a department spokesman. In the interview he said he "tried to de-politicize the hiring process" and filled jobs with applicants from "across the political spectrum." Attention is turning to Schlozman after the announcement last week that the Justice Department opened an internal investigation to determine whether Monica Goodling, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' White House liaison, illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring entry-level prosecutors. The department's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility are conducting that inquiry jointly. Federal law and Justice Department policies bar the consideration of political affiliation in hiring of personnel for non-political, career jobs. A congressional aide, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that the House and Senate Judiciary Committees want to look beyond Goodling to see whether other department officials may have skewed recruiting and hiring to favor Republican applicants. Investigators have heard allegations that Schlozman showed a political bias in hiring and hope the department will permit him to be interviewed voluntarily, the aide said. Sen. Claire McCaskell, D-Mo., told National Public Radio last week that she wants to hear testimony from Schlozman because "more answers under oath need to be given." One of the former Justice Department employees, Clevenger, is pursuing a whistleblower suit alleging he was wrongly fired for exposing mistreatment of employees by his Special Litigation Section chief. Clevenger and the other lawyer recounted Schlozman's odd handling of their job applications in the spring of 2005. Clevenger said his resume stated that he was a member of the conservative Federalist Society and the Texas chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The other applicant's resume cited work on President Bush's 2000 campaign, said the attorney, who insisted upon anonymity for fear of retaliation. They said Schlozman directed them to drop the political references and resubmit the resumes in what they believed were an effort to hide those conservative affiliations. Clevenger also recalled once passing on to Schlozman the name of a friend from Stanford as a possible hire. "Schlozman called me up and asked me something to the effect of, `Is he one of us?'" Clevenger said. "He wanted to know what the guy's partisan credentials were." Schlozman, who recently completed more than a year's service as interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City that was marked with controversy, has drawn harsh criticism over his conduct as the top deputy in the Civil Rights Division starting in 2003 and a term of roughly seven months as its acting chief beginning in the spring of 2005. Several former department lawyers assailed his treatment of senior employees and his rollback of longstanding policies aimed at protecting African-American voting rights. They blame him for driving veteran attorneys, including section chief Joseph Rich, to resign from their posts. Rich recently told Congress that 15 of the 35 attorneys in the voting rights section have resigned since 2005. Former employees of the Voting Rights Section told McClatchy of at least eight hires since then of employees with conservative political connections. The Boston Globe, which obtained resumes of civil rights hires under the Freedom of Information Act, reported Sunday that seven of 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of either the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association. Rich, who left the agency on April 30, 2005, and now works for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told McClatchy Newspapers that Schlozman was "central to implementation of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division" and said he treated career lawyers with "disdain" and "vindictiveness." His former deputy, Robert Kengle, told McClatchy that "Schlozman was never wrong and to even raise that possibility was asking for retribution." Schlozman's hiring favored lawyers "with one primary characteristic - links to the Republican Party and right-wing groups," said David Becker, who left the section the same day as Rich. "The lawyers hired by Schlozman, in virtually every case, had very little litigation experience, lesser academic credentials and, if they had any civil rights experience, it was in opposing the enforcement of civil rights laws," Becker told McClatchy. One of those hired, Joshua Rogers, had been a law clerk for Mississippi federal Judge Charles Pickering, whom President Bush nominated for an appeals court judgeship over objections from civil rights groups. Shortly after assuming his new job, Rogers was the lone dissenter in a staff recommendation that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring every voter to produce a photo identification card - a law later found unconstitutional by a federal judge. Schlozman said in the interview that staff "were only treated professionally" while he was in the Civil Rights Division and that in hiring, "I didn't care what your ideological perspective was." He pointed to the recruitment of Mark Kappelhoff, a former counsel for the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, to head the division's Criminal Section, and to the promotion of Chris Coates, a former ACLU voting counsel, to serve as the top deputy chief of the voting section. Rich and other lawyers said politics had little or no bearing on Kappelhoff's job - overseeing prosecution of human trafficking and police misconduct. They said Coates seemed to grow more conservative after his superiors passed him over for a promotion in favor of an African-American woman, and he filed a reverse-discrimination suit. Congress Widens Justice Department Probe Monday 07 May 2007 Congress sought cooperation from one Justice Department official and prepared to put the agency's former White House liaison under oath in a widening investigation into the politics of Justice Department decision-making. The Senate Judiciary Committee asked Bradley Schlozman, a former senior civil rights attorney and U.S. attorney, to speak with investigators. The Justice Department, meanwhile, said it wouldn't try to prevent Congress from granting immunity to White House liaison Monica Goodling if she testifies before a committee. Lawmakers want to talk to Schlozman and Goodling as part of an inquiry into whether the department played politics with the hiring and firing of department officials. The inquiry began as a question about whether U.S. attorneys - presidential appointees who serve as the top federal law enforcement officials in their state districts - were fired for political reasons. It has grown, however, into an investigation of whether the agency let politics affect criminal investigations and whether officials made employment decisions for political reasons. Lawmakers want to question Schlozman, who now works for the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, about a voter fraud lawsuit he filed against Missouri in November 2005. Committee members said they wanted to know whether U.S. Attorney Todd Graves of Kansas City, Mo., was forced out for not endorsing that lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed. Graves resigned from his post in March 2006 and Schlozman replaced him as interim U.S. attorney. Five days before the November 2006 election, Schlozman filed another lawsuit, this time accusing members of a liberal activist group of voter registration fraud. Justice Department policy discourages such lawsuits so close to the election. "The committee would benefit from hearing directly from you in order to gain a better understanding of the role voter fraud may have played in the administration's decisions to retain or remove certain U.S. attorneys," Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote in a letter co-signed by the committee's top Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. The letter asked Schlozman to voluntarily submit to interviews and testimony and provide documents to the committee. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said politics do not influence decisions about whether to bring a case. "The Justice Department brings its civil actions and criminal prosecutions based on evidence, not on politics," Boyd said. "We expect U.S. Attorneys to bring election and voter fraud cases where evidence of such fraud exists." The Justice Department is conducting an internal review of the firings of U.S. attorneys and other decisions. As part of that investigation, the agency is reviewing whether Goodling sought to place Republicans as front-line prosecutors in state U.S. attorney districts. Lawmakers want to question Goodling but, without a promise of immunity, she has refused. In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., the department said it would prefer not to see an immunity deal. "However, we understand the committee's interest in obtaining Ms. Goodling's testimony," the letter said. "Therefore, after balancing the significant public interest against the impact of the committee's actions on our ongoing investigation, we will not raise an objection or seek a deferral." The letter was signed by Inspector General Glenn Fine and H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel to the Office of Professional Responsibility. Committee lawyers must now send an immunity request to a federal judge for approval. Once that deal is approved, Goodling would face a contempt order if she refused to testify. Her lawyer, John M. Dowd, said Monday she would testify under such a deal. "She'll be honest and clear and she'll work very hard to answer all questions," Dowd said. Conyers said he would move quickly to ask a judge to approve the immunity deal and schedule a hearing. A congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because no agreement on testimony had been reached, said lawmakers were planning to hold a hearing as early as next week and hoped to secure testimony from Schlozman. -------- Associated Press writer Sam Hananel contributed to this report.
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