The Enemy Within-Justice Department Division
I've mentioned before that the larger and more
important aspect of the U.S. Attorney scandal has to do with the U.S. Attorneys
that were not fired, that is, the extent to which some U.S. Attorneys willingly
embraced the marching orders from Washington to politicize our system of
justice. That itself is just a smaller part of the larger story-the
politicization of the Justice Department at all levels. A few related (the dots
connect themselves) developments illustrate the
point:
First, it appears that Monica Goodling's decision to take the Fifth Amendment may have had as much to do with the Bushie's attempt to permanently pervert the Justice Department as it did with the fact that she provided false information to Paul McNulty, which he duly passed along to the Congress. Goodling was deeply involved in Ashcroft, and then Gonzales' attempts to staff critical sections of the Department with fourth rate legal minds from some of our finer fundamentalist law schools, particularly Pat Robertson's Regent University, where Goodling herself was spawned. Naturally you can't stuff the Justice Department full of pasty faced Bible thumping drones without lowering standards just a bit, (affirmative action for the religious right?) but that wasn't a problem for Ashcroft or Gonzales:
Not long ago, it was rare for Regent graduates to join the federal government. But in 2001, the Bush administration picked the dean of Regent's government school, Kay Coles James , to be the director of the Office of Personnel Management -- essentially the head of human resources for the executive branch. The doors of opportunity for government jobs were thrown open to Regent alumni.
"We've had great placement," said Jay Sekulow , who heads a non profit law firm based at Regent that files lawsuits aimed at lowering barriers between church and state. "We've had a lot of people in key positions."
Many of those who have Regent law degrees, including Goodling, joined the Department of Justice. Their path to employment was further eased in late 2002, when John Ashcroft , then attorney general, changed longstanding rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks.
Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools.
In a recent Regent law school newsletter, a 2004 graduate described being interviewed for a job as a trial attorney at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in October 2003. Asked to name the Supreme Court decision from the past 20 years with which he most disagreed, he cited Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling striking down a law against sodomy because it violated gay people's civil rights.
"When one of the interviewers agreed and said that decision in Lawrence was 'maddening,' I knew I correctly answered the question," wrote the Regent graduate . The administration hired him for the Civil Rights Division's housing section -- the only employment offer he received after graduation, he said.
Hillary Clinton was right about the vast right wing conspiracy. The point here is to infiltrate the government with career civil servants whose primary loyalty is to the Republican Party, religious right division, rather than either the government or the law. The next president will be stuck with a Justice Department well stocked with these zombies, who will see it as their duty to obstruct progressive law enforcement. These people think things out, and they are in this for the long haul.
Senator Shumer appears to have information that leads him to believe that very overt political tests were used in hiring at Justice. This would be an end run -oops, I mean, a violation of the laws put into place to prevent that very thing.
One of Monica's schoolmates was recently, at the ripe old age of 33, lacking any meaningful prosecutorial experience, named as the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, where, after having herself coronated, she immediately proceeded to destroy her office, perhaps (and hopefully) committing crimes in the process:
This little tidbit about the problems 33-year-old Bushie Rachel Paulose is having running the U.S. Attorney's office in Minneapolis isn't getting as much attention as it perhaps deserves:
Paulose ordered that an internal memo be prepared for high-ranking Justice Department officials who would be coming to Minneapolis from Washington to highlight the office's high-profile cases, the attorneys said.
Paulose instructed the head of the narcotics section, Andy Dunne, to state in the memo that prosecutors had won convictions that ended drug dealing by St. Paul's Latin Kings gang, they said.
Dunne was told by Paulose to say that the Latin Kings were the biggest gang in St. Paul and that the office's recent convictions would stop the so-called Latin King Nation, the attorneys said.
But Dunne told Paulose he couldn't abide by the request, one of the attorneys said, and when he refused, Dunne was forced to give up his position as chief of the narcotics section. Dunne would not comment Friday.
...
Paulose, by this account, instructed a subordinate to make some statements to high-ranking Justice Department officials coming to visit the office. When the subordinate refused to make those statements (presumably because they weren't true) she demoted him.
Knowingly providing false information in the course of an investigation is a crime. Besides attempting to subvert the course of justice she has turned off the career prosecutors so badly that her deputies have asked for demotions rather than be responsible for implementing her policies.
Meanwhile, it is becoming apparent that not every U.S. Attorney refused to knuckle under to the pressure, or that they all even wanted to. From Wisconsin:
Federal judges Thursday ruled that former state purchasing supervisor Georgia L. Thompson was wrongly convicted of making sure a state travel contract went to a firm linked to Gov. Jim Doyle's re-election campaign and freed her from an Illinois prison.
The three-judge panel in Chicago acted with unusual speed, ruling after oral arguments by Thompson's attorney and the U.S. attorney's office.
During 26 minutes of oral arguments, all three judges assailed the government's case, with Judge Diane Wood saying at one point that "the evidence is beyond thin."
During a news conference later Thursday, Doyle, a former state attorney general, said the three judges did an "extraordinary thing" by entering an order finding Thompson innocent and ordering her immediate release.
Would you be surprised if I told you that Thompson's conviction was used in campaign ads aimed at the Democratic governor?
Of course, Justice is not the only department in which this is being played out. Normally, an incoming administration can put its stamp on the government apparatus rather quickly by replacing political appointees. Provided it is not too extreme, the bureaucracy will implement policy, though it does have its ways of putting the brakes on things, for good or evil. But this is different. The Bushies have organized a return to the spoils system, only the next guy in doesn't get to take back the spoils These people are now protected by the same civil service laws that were flouted in order to hire them. The federal government is infested with people with a fundamental belief that government does not work and is nothing but an instrument for the maintenance of power for the right.
It's going to be hard going for the next president.
First, it appears that Monica Goodling's decision to take the Fifth Amendment may have had as much to do with the Bushie's attempt to permanently pervert the Justice Department as it did with the fact that she provided false information to Paul McNulty, which he duly passed along to the Congress. Goodling was deeply involved in Ashcroft, and then Gonzales' attempts to staff critical sections of the Department with fourth rate legal minds from some of our finer fundamentalist law schools, particularly Pat Robertson's Regent University, where Goodling herself was spawned. Naturally you can't stuff the Justice Department full of pasty faced Bible thumping drones without lowering standards just a bit, (affirmative action for the religious right?) but that wasn't a problem for Ashcroft or Gonzales:
Not long ago, it was rare for Regent graduates to join the federal government. But in 2001, the Bush administration picked the dean of Regent's government school, Kay Coles James , to be the director of the Office of Personnel Management -- essentially the head of human resources for the executive branch. The doors of opportunity for government jobs were thrown open to Regent alumni.
"We've had great placement," said Jay Sekulow , who heads a non profit law firm based at Regent that files lawsuits aimed at lowering barriers between church and state. "We've had a lot of people in key positions."
Many of those who have Regent law degrees, including Goodling, joined the Department of Justice. Their path to employment was further eased in late 2002, when John Ashcroft , then attorney general, changed longstanding rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks.
Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools.
In a recent Regent law school newsletter, a 2004 graduate described being interviewed for a job as a trial attorney at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in October 2003. Asked to name the Supreme Court decision from the past 20 years with which he most disagreed, he cited Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling striking down a law against sodomy because it violated gay people's civil rights.
"When one of the interviewers agreed and said that decision in Lawrence was 'maddening,' I knew I correctly answered the question," wrote the Regent graduate . The administration hired him for the Civil Rights Division's housing section -- the only employment offer he received after graduation, he said.
Hillary Clinton was right about the vast right wing conspiracy. The point here is to infiltrate the government with career civil servants whose primary loyalty is to the Republican Party, religious right division, rather than either the government or the law. The next president will be stuck with a Justice Department well stocked with these zombies, who will see it as their duty to obstruct progressive law enforcement. These people think things out, and they are in this for the long haul.
Senator Shumer appears to have information that leads him to believe that very overt political tests were used in hiring at Justice. This would be an end run -oops, I mean, a violation of the laws put into place to prevent that very thing.
One of Monica's schoolmates was recently, at the ripe old age of 33, lacking any meaningful prosecutorial experience, named as the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, where, after having herself coronated, she immediately proceeded to destroy her office, perhaps (and hopefully) committing crimes in the process:
This little tidbit about the problems 33-year-old Bushie Rachel Paulose is having running the U.S. Attorney's office in Minneapolis isn't getting as much attention as it perhaps deserves:
Paulose ordered that an internal memo be prepared for high-ranking Justice Department officials who would be coming to Minneapolis from Washington to highlight the office's high-profile cases, the attorneys said.
Paulose instructed the head of the narcotics section, Andy Dunne, to state in the memo that prosecutors had won convictions that ended drug dealing by St. Paul's Latin Kings gang, they said.
Dunne was told by Paulose to say that the Latin Kings were the biggest gang in St. Paul and that the office's recent convictions would stop the so-called Latin King Nation, the attorneys said.
But Dunne told Paulose he couldn't abide by the request, one of the attorneys said, and when he refused, Dunne was forced to give up his position as chief of the narcotics section. Dunne would not comment Friday.
...
Paulose, by this account, instructed a subordinate to make some statements to high-ranking Justice Department officials coming to visit the office. When the subordinate refused to make those statements (presumably because they weren't true) she demoted him.
Knowingly providing false information in the course of an investigation is a crime. Besides attempting to subvert the course of justice she has turned off the career prosecutors so badly that her deputies have asked for demotions rather than be responsible for implementing her policies.
Meanwhile, it is becoming apparent that not every U.S. Attorney refused to knuckle under to the pressure, or that they all even wanted to. From Wisconsin:
Federal judges Thursday ruled that former state purchasing supervisor Georgia L. Thompson was wrongly convicted of making sure a state travel contract went to a firm linked to Gov. Jim Doyle's re-election campaign and freed her from an Illinois prison.
The three-judge panel in Chicago acted with unusual speed, ruling after oral arguments by Thompson's attorney and the U.S. attorney's office.
During 26 minutes of oral arguments, all three judges assailed the government's case, with Judge Diane Wood saying at one point that "the evidence is beyond thin."
During a news conference later Thursday, Doyle, a former state attorney general, said the three judges did an "extraordinary thing" by entering an order finding Thompson innocent and ordering her immediate release.
Would you be surprised if I told you that Thompson's conviction was used in campaign ads aimed at the Democratic governor?
Of course, Justice is not the only department in which this is being played out. Normally, an incoming administration can put its stamp on the government apparatus rather quickly by replacing political appointees. Provided it is not too extreme, the bureaucracy will implement policy, though it does have its ways of putting the brakes on things, for good or evil. But this is different. The Bushies have organized a return to the spoils system, only the next guy in doesn't get to take back the spoils These people are now protected by the same civil service laws that were flouted in order to hire them. The federal government is infested with people with a fundamental belief that government does not work and is nothing but an instrument for the maintenance of power for the right.
It's going to be hard going for the next president.
Posted: Monday - April 09, 2007 at 07:32 PM
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