The politicization of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is not entirely new. Far-right attorneys suddenly were given employment priority. Career staffers were pressured out of their jobs. Cases without merit would be pushed by political appointees. All of a sudden, a department that existed to protect the integrity of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and shield African American voters from discrimination, started prosecuting reverse discrimination cases.
As it turns out, it gets worse. As Paul Kiel noted today, a local DC news station crunched some numbers in the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section — the section charged with prosecuting the worst civil rights offenses like hate crimes — and found an interesting trend.
The I-Team has learned that since 2003…the criminal section within the Civil Rights Division has not hired a single black attorney to replace those who have left. Not one.
As a result, the current face of civil rights prosecutions looks like this: Out of fifty attorneys in the Criminal Section – only two are black. The same number the criminal section had in 1978 – even though the size of the staff has more than doubled.
Richard Ugelow was a supervisor at the Civil Rights section that sues government employers for discrimination in hiring and promotion for more than a decade, and was repulsed by the results of the investigation. “We would sue employers for having numbers like that,” Ugelow said.
As for the Civil Rights Division’s voting rights section, we’re learning some disturbing details about its employment practices, too.
McClatchy reported this stunner last night.
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.”
Got that? Schlozman wanted to limit employment opportunities at the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division to Republicans, but if he hired a bunch of lawyers with the word “Republican” all over their resumes, it might look funny. So, Schlozman simply told the applicants to remove the GOP reference, so that he could appear to be fair. This, just two weeks after we learned that Schlozman screened job applicants to make sure they were loyal Republicans.
I shudder to think how long it will take for Bush’s successor to turn the Justice Department back into a reasonably functional law enforcement agency again. Let’s hope recovery is even possible, at this point.