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Ear to the Ground

Bush’s Politics-First Justice Department Has a New Poster Boy

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Posted on Jan 13, 2009
Department of Justice

An internal investigation has found that Bradley Schlozman, a former high-ranking Justice Department official, hired and promoted conservative “right-thinking Americans” while making it clear that “adherents of Mao’s little red book need not apply” to work in his wing of the Justice Department. He also transferred an employee for allegedly using “ebonics.”

That’s just the sort of man you want running the civil rights division. Or not.

Schlozman apparently lied to Congress about his shenanigans, but the U.S. attorney isn’t going to prosecute. At this point, it would just be weird if a Bush administration official was held accountable for doing something wrong.


Washington Post:

The department’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that Bradley J. Schlozman violated civil service laws and made false statements about his activities to Congress in 2007, but federal prosecutors in the District declined to pursue a criminal perjury case against him.

Over three years in which he controlled employment decisions, Schlozman favored young conservatives for entry-level jobs, transferred those he called “right-thinking Americans” into top assignments and instructed colleagues that “adherents of Mao’s little red book need not apply,” according to e-mails cited in the report. Authorities analyzed 112 career hires during Schlozman’s tenure and determined that “virtually all” of the lawyers whose political affiliations were known at the time had ties to Republicans or conservative legal groups.

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By Hesperion, January 14, 2009 at 7:55 pm Link to this comment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung

This is how it begins. This is the very fascism which our fathers and grandfathers fought the war against in the 30’s and 40’s. This man’s ideology is precisely what that war was against.

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By Maezeppa, January 14, 2009 at 5:02 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

If I’m ever brought up on charges I’m going to tell the Judge to dismiss the case because “it all happened in the past”.

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By Shift, January 14, 2009 at 1:08 pm Link to this comment

What a surprise, another neo-zionist neo-con breaks the law and dismisses the Constitution.

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By cyrena, January 14, 2009 at 9:03 am Link to this comment

•  “..The report’s description of racial and political bias at the department underscores the difficulty of the task before Holder, who not only would oversee enforcement of the nation’s civil rights laws but also would have to deal with diversity issues at his agency…”

This is an odd statement. I’ll agree that the racial and political bias currently operating in the department poses a difficult task for Holder, because the nation’s civil rights laws have NOT been enforced by the department charged with doing exactly that. Instead, these laws have been consistently VIOLATED by the very entity charged with upholding and enforcing them. But I don’t see what that has to do with any ‘diversity’ issues at his agency. I guess I don’t get the connection there. Ideally, the enforcement of the nation’s civil rights laws is best performed by a diverse group of people with that as the common goal. So this connection seems like a false dichotomy, at least to me. Maybe someone can enlighten me from a different perspective. What ‘diversity issues’ is he talking about?

Meantime, I don’t think Eric Holder is gonna have any troubles at all overseeing the enforcement of the nation’s civil rights laws, at least once he rids the department of anything the departing rats try to leave behind. I think THAT will be the largest task for him. Just cleaning up the personnel apparatus of the entire department. It needs the full treatment (tented-style) extermination. Not the home version for nuisance pests, but an INDUSTRIAL sized operation to make a clean sweep of the poison that has been allowed to overtake that entire branch of our government.

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