J ournalists had a high old time blasting Bush appointees at the Department of Justice last week for allegedly politicizing the hiring system for career — i.e., non-politically selected — jobs. But the media missed the bigger picture.
Career federal employees at DOJ are already heavily politicized, not to the right but to the left. Investigations have been skewed not in favor of Republicans, but for Democrats. And departmental policy choices — the very things elections are supposed to determine — have been repeatedly obstructed by intransigent careerists who refuse to recognize that their job is not to set policy but to implement it.
In one case at least, it appears that the liberal bias of careerists may have harmed national security.
Last week’s media tut-tutting stemmed from a report by DOJ’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility. The report detailed claimed instances of Bush political appointees improperly considering political ideology in choosing among applicants for two sets of entry-level jobs.
For instance, seemingly qualified applicants were adjudged “unacceptable” because, among other things, the application essays were “filled with leftist commentary and buzz words.”
OK, let’s play along. Let’s grant that the explicit use of political criteria was out of line. But the dirty little secret is that the practice for years at Justice has been for career employees who lean left to discreetly screen out conservative applicants. Buried in last week’s report is strong evidence of this ideological buddy system.
Careerists screened the applicants before they were forwarded to the selection committee. Last week’s report noted that for one program, “of the 451 [applicants] forwarded to the Screening Committee, we found that 68 (15 percent) listed work experience or activities with a liberal group, 16 (4 percent) listed work experience or activitieswith a conservative group.” For another entry-level program, the discrepancy was just as severe: 150 forwarded applicants with liberal affiliations compared with just 28 with conservative affiliations.
Bush political appointees have complained for years, with reason, that the liberal careerists often try to torpedo administration policy choices — “on things large and small,” one former top aide to former Attorney General John Ashcroft told me.
This aide, who was not involved in the hiring controversies in any way, gave as an example DOJ careerists’ strong obstructionism against Ashcroft’s decision to focus on illegal guns instead of illegal gun ownership. Such policy choices about the most effective use of resources are what elections are all about.
This aide and another also pointed to the botched investigation of former national security adviser Sandy Berger as Exhibit A for their contention that departmental bias favored the left.
Berger infamously stashed classified documents from the National Archives into socks and other hiding places, took them home and shredded them before the 9/11 Commission could review them.
But despite prodding from upper levels of the Justice Department, Clinton-era hires John Dion and Bruce Swartz, among others, repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of Berger’s actions, slow-walked the investigation, refused to focus on Berger’s first two visits to the archives and never followed up with an important polygraph test.
“If a Republican U.S. attorney handled an investigation like this,” the former Ashcroft aide said, “[House Judiciary Committee Chairman] John Conyers would be papering everybody with subpoenas, The New York Times would be railing about it daily, and Chris Matthews would be turning red in the face.”
A Jan. 9, 2007, staff report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform blasted DOJ for blowing the case. “The Justice Department was unacceptably incurious” about some of the issues, the report said. “The Justice Department never notified the 9/11 Commission. … The Justice Department failed to subpoena. … The Justice Department failed to administer. … The Justice Department failed to explain. …” And so on.
In the end, the Dion-Swartz team worked out a plea agreement for Berger to pay a mere $10,000 fine and give up his security clearance for three years. Federal magistrate Deborah Robinson excoriated the department for its leniency, and bumped up the fine to $50,000 because the “inadequate” $10,000 fine “does not reflect the seriousness of the offense.”
But leniency against liberal scofflaws is the order of the day when civil-service-protected attorneys play leftist politics under the guise of career, non-political employees.
