Serving George, not the country or rule of law

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Jul 28, 2008 at 21:31:00 PM MST

Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson were the main culprits. "What is it about George W. Bush  that makes you want to serve him?" asked Goodling, regularly, to candidates for career jobs.

As Steve Benen points out, this is the second of four reports being prepared by the DoJ's Inspector General, and that the first report "documented six years of illegal hiring practices" in the department, so it's hardly anything new. Still, it contains some egregious behavior.

....Because EOUSA had been unable to fill the counterterrorism detail after Goodling vetoed this candidate, a current EOUSA detailee was asked to assume EOUSA's counterterrorism portfolio....He had no counterterrorism experience and had less than the minimum of 5 years of federal criminal prosecution experience required by the EOUSA job announcement. Battle, Nowacki, Kelly, and Voris all said they thought that he was not qualified for the position, since he had no counterterrorism experience. The replacement candidate was a registered Republican who Goodling had interviewed and approved before he was selected for his EOUSA detail.

Drum: "Your Bush administration at work: When it's politically convenient, the war on terror is vitally important. When it's not, it's not."

Dday asks the all-too relevant and familiar question:

...who will be held accountable, if anyone? Under the relevant statutes, much of the punishment concerning Hatch Act violations like this concerns removal from office, and most of those implicated in this report have already left DoJ....Goodling and her pals may get disbarred for illegal hiring and lawbreaking, or maybe not. The IG's recommendations all concern how to prevent illegal hiring practices like this in the future, and have little effect on the sins of the past. More importantly, we don't even know how many career positions throughout the DoJ, particularly those working as immigration judges, are the ones who passed Goodling's loyalty tests and are now permanently installed inside the government. You can say that a new Democratic Administration should immediately fire everyone Goodling hired and start the process over again. I'm not sure that is legal under civil service reform laws....What Goodling and her team did was to go around the spoils system that was the impetus for civil service reform, but there would have to be some kind of executive finding that the hiring process was polluted and would need to be reworked. And this would of course be a major undertaking for the DoJ, although I would argue a necessary one.

If this is ignored, you are going to see all kinds of whistleblowers and martyrs coming out of the woodwork in an Obama Administration, telling lurid and probably false tales accusing them of exactly what the Bush Administration put into practice and more. And they will be held up on the right as shining examples of patriots who understand how the rule of law must be respected at all times.

Still, the worst is probably yet to come. The DoJ Inspector General's upcoming reports will apparently concentrate on irregular hiring practices in the DoJ's civil rights division and the infamous "prosecutor purge." I suspect we'll not only find out how deep the politicization of Justice went, we'll also see the direct results of that politicization, as prosecutors were chased off of cases that didn't "serve" George W. Bush.

I know of at least one prosecutor -- Carol Lam -- who appears to have been fired because she went too hard after corruption cases dealing with Jack Abramoff. Are there others?