Report Reveals Administration Played Politics with Voters’ Rights

by Jonah Goldman

A recent report issued by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility chief H. Marshall Jarrett shed more light on a subject we’ve been covering over the past year, the injection of partisan politics into the Department of Justice for political gain (For more information visit our Playing Politics with Voters’ Rights page).  The report uncovers a program, started in 2002 while John Ashcroft was still Attorney General, to exclude applicants with Democratic or progressive leanings from the honors program.  The honors program historically has been run by senior career officials, with the intent to hire 150 of the best law school graduates, regardless of political affiliation or ideological leanings.

According to Washington Post Staff Writer Carrie Johnson, the report alleges that "High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department’s ranks." Specifically, Johnson explains that

The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials. Shifting control of the program to Ashcroft’s advisers prompted charges of partisanship from law professors and former government lawyers who had worked under Democratic administrations...

Critics in the department had argued that hundreds of high-quality applicants had been rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, according to correspondence at the time. One Harvard Law School graduate said that when he applied for the honors program a few years ago he was warned by professors and fellow students to remove any liberal affiliations from his résumé.

Click here to read Johnson’s article.