By Jason Leopold

A scathing report issued Tuesday by the Department of Justice’s inspector general found that a former top official in the agency’s civil rights division lied to a Senate committee and broke federal law by using a political litmus test to hire and fire employees–a violation of the very laws he was charged with upholding.

However, the U.S. Attorneys office for the District of Columbia declined last Friday to prosecute Bradley Schlozman, the former acting head of the DOJ’s civil rights division, despite finding that he violated a number of federal laws during his tenure at the agency, according to Glenn Fine, the DOJ’s inspector general, who referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Schlozman did not cooperate with the probe.

“The evidence in our investigation showed that Schlozman, first as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General and subsequently as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Acting Assistant Attorney General, considered political and ideological affiliations in hiring career attorneys and in other personnel actions affecting career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division,” says the report issued by Inspector General Glenn Fine.”In doing so, he violated federal law – the Civil Service Reform Act – and Department policy that prohibit discrimination in federal employment based on political and ideological affiliations, and committed misconduct.

“The evidence also showed that Division managers failed to exercise sufficient oversight to ensure that Schlozman did not engage in inappropriate hiring and personnel practices.”‘
Federal law and Justice Department policy prohibit the use of political or ideological affiliations to assess applicants for career attorney positions in the Department and in the management of career attorneys.”

Schlozman resigned in August 2007 following heated testimony he gave before a Senate committee. The report said that Schlozman lied to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, in June 2007 when he testified that he did not consider a job applicant’s political affiliation when they interviewed for employment and “made false statements… in his written responses to the supplemental questions for the record.”

But the investigation “found that Schlozman made statements boasting to others about using political and ideological affiliations in hiring for career Civil Rights attorney positions.”

“One example is an e-mail dated January 6, 2004, from Schlozman to an attorney hired by Schlozman in the Division,” the report said. “Shortly after being hired, the attorney sent an e-mail to Schlozman expressing his happiness in the Special Litigation Section, noting that his “office is even next to a Federalist Society member.” Schlozman replied by e-mail, “Just between you and me, we hired another member of ‘the team’ yesterday. And still another ideological comrade will be starting in one month. So we are making progress.”

Schlozman later amended his Senate testimony.

Fine’s report, which was prepared jointly with the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, is the final installment of the watchdog’s two-year investigation into the politicization of the department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Fine and H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the OPR, issued three previous reports that found nine U.S. Attorneys were fired for partisan political reasons and interns were not hired if their resumes displayed a liberal bent.

“This report confirms the committee’s work showing that the Bush Justice Department abandoned its mission to promote fairness and equal justice under the law,” said John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, whose panel has spent considerable time probing the politicization of the DOJ. “Indeed, the Civil Rights Division that is charged with preventing employment discrimination instead appears to have been guilty of it. Partisan politics infected the honors program and other hiring decisions, personnel transfers, and even which cases went to which attorneys, and Division leadership failed to stop it. For example, the niece of a former Bush agency head was hired even though the career section chief concluded she was not qualified. The new administration must take active steps to restore the department’s mission to promote civil rights.”

Schlozman retaliated against DOJ staffers he believed were liberal, writing in an e-mail to a colleague that “bitchslapping a bunch of (division) attorneys really did get the blood pumping and was even enjoyable once in a while.”

Schlozman said he preferred hiring conservatives, or “real Americans” as opposed to “pinkos” and “libs,” and in another e-mail wrote that a lot of time has passed since he had to “scream with a bloodcurdling cry at some commie.”

“Several Division attorneys told us that Schlozman expressed disdain for the career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, believing them to be mostly liberal and Democrats,” the report added. “According to several of these attorneys, Schlozman stated his desire to hire “real Americans” into the Division, a term that many witnesses told us Schlozman used when referring to political conservatives. Several Division attorneys and officials said that Schlozman made statements to them about his efforts to hire conservatives or Republicans into the Division.”

The report also said Schlozman turned over some high-profile cases to department attorney he believed shared his conservative values. For example, in turning over an appeals case to a conservative colleague Schlozman said “the potential stakes are too great to entrust this to either a lib or an idiot.”

William Jordan, Schlozman’s attorney, vehemently denied the report’s findings.

“The report released today is inaccurate, incomplete, biased, unsupported by the law, and contrary to the facts,” Jordan said.

The investigation into Schlozman and politicization of the civil rights division was conducted by a team of attorneys from Fine and Jarrett’s offices, a special agent from the inspector general’s office, and program analysts.  

“Our investigation examined the hiring practices of the Civil Rights Division from 2001 to 2007.  However, most of the allegations focused in particular on the period of Schlozman’s tenure in the Division, May 2003 through March 2006,” the report said. “The OIG/OPR team interviewed more than 120 current and former employees of the Civil Rights Division, including political appointees, career attorneys, and human resources personnel. We reviewed thousands of pages of documents pertaining to the career attorneys hired in the Civil Rights Division from 2002 to 2007.  The team also reviewed over 200,000 e-mails of relevant personnel in the Civil Rights Division, including Schlozman.”

Last year, a grand jury began examining whether Schlozman committed perjury. Subpoenas were issued to a number of witnesses, including former Justice Department attorneys, who worked with Schlozman.

The grand jury probe was launched after federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorneys office in Washington, D.C. received a referral from Fine and Jarrett’s offices. Tuesday’s report says the investigation into Schlozman’s time at the civil rights division was concluded last July but the publication of the report was withheld while the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia decided whether to pursue criminal charges.

“We referred the findings from our investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in March 2008. We completed this written report of investigation in July 2008,” the report says. “We provided to the prosecutor the evidence we gathered in the course of our investigation, including transcripts of interviews and relevant documents and e-mails. The U.S. Attorney’s Office informed us on January 9, 2009, of its decision to decline prosecution of Schlozman. The Interim U.S. Attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, was recused from the matter and the decision.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday that he “really wish[ed] that the current U.S. attorney’s office appointed by this administration had prosecuted” Schlozman.

“I think that the only way you stop such blatant criminal violations by people who know better, people who are sworn to uphold the law, that they know they’ll go to jail for breaking the law,” Leahy said. “That’s what should have been done. And just because they broke the law in the Bush administration and the Bush administration did not, or deemed not to prosecute, I think that raises real questions. Prosecution should be done no matter who breaks the law. I think about one of the people who testified that same investigation and said that, uh, “we swear an oath to President George Bush.” I said, “no, you swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. That constitution is the constitution you’re sworn to uphold and I’m sworn to uphold and it’s the constitution that reflects all Americans.

“And when somebody deliberately, purposely sets out to subvert the constitution of the United States, and then lies about it, lies about it, Mr. President, I find that a heinous crime. We will see some kid who steals a car, they’ll be prosecuted as they probably should. But when you have a key member of the DoJ lie about it under oath, who subverts the constitution of the United States, all the more reason to prosecute that person. Mr. President what Mr. Schlozman did was reprehensible, it was disgusting, it was wrong, goes at the very core of America’s principles.”

Schlozman also played a role in the firing of at least one federal prosecutor. In March 2006, Schlozman replaced Todd Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. Graves had regularly clashed with Schlozman about his refusal to prosecute alleged cases of voter fraud.

But as Graves’ replacement, Schlozman filed federal criminal charges of voter fraud against members of the Association for Community Reform Now (ACORN) the evening of the November 2006 mid-term election. The case was later dismissed and Schlozman came under fire for his actions. Longstanding Justice Department policy states that charges related to voter fraud should not be close to an election. Schlozman testified before a Senate committee last year that he received approval to file the voter fraud charges from a Justice Department official who was instrumental in drafting the guidelines urging that US attorneys avoid filing charges claiming voter fraud at the height of an election.

Allegations that ACORN had committed voter fraud were a major issue raised by Republicans and the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain during the tail end of his campaign last year.

John McKay, the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington who was one of the nine federal prosecutors fired, said in an interview with me in 2007 that when Schlozman was selected to replace Graves as US attorney, “many eyebrows were raised.”

“Many US attorneys were concerned when Mr. Schlozman was appointed,” McKay said in an interview last year. “He was the deputy in the [Justice Department's] civil rights division, but I don’t think he had the sort of background and experience we would have expected as a United States attorney,” McKay told me. “So I would say it would be true that many eyebrows were raised when he was first appointed. Of course, we didn’t know that Todd Graves had been forced to resign … and it appears that he was forced to resign at least in part because Mr. Schlozman himself was trying to push the prosecution of voter fraud cases.”

Schlozman is now an attorney in private practices in Wichita, Kansas.

In a somewhat related move, a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Bush administration must turn to President-elect Barack Obama’s staff documents it has been withholding from Congress related to the White House’s role in the firing of the nine U.S. Attorneys.

Conyers’ committee has been pursuing testimony and documents from White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers about their involvement in the decision to fire the federal prosecutors. President George W. Bush has asserted executive privilege in blocking Bolten and Miers, who were both subpoenaed, from testifying before Congress. Last week, a new set of House rules were passed that revived subpoenas issued during the 110th Congress.