This is something I’ve long suspected, but soon we’ll be sure about it:
High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department’s ranks, according to an inspector general’s report to be released today.
The report will trace the effort to 2002, early in the Bush administration, when key advisers to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft moved to exert more control over the program to hire rookie lawyers and summer interns, according to two people familiar with the probe.
The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials.
[ . . . ]
Critics in the department had argued that hundreds of high-quality applicants had been rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, according to correspondence at the time.
They’ll be there long after this Administration is gone.
Update: TPM is finding lots of fun stuff in the report, but I think this email (which is sent by a US Attorney to a DOJ official vetting the applications) illustrates it pretty well:
My initial reaction is that the guy is probably quite liberal. He is clerking for a very activist, ATLA-oriented justice. His law review article appears to favor reintroduction of wolves on federal lands, a very controversial issue here which pits environmentalists against lots of other interests, including virtually all conservative and moderate thinkers. I know of better candidates through our internship and clerkship programs who have applied to the honors program.
Freddie
when Jihadists nuke Washington, I cannot take refuge in my fridge.
So we’ll have a civil service that is not all left wingers. Good.
MB
Have you ever considered, Freddie, that spending too much time in your fridge may be the reason you think it’s not entirely ridiculous to say things like “when Jihadists nuke Washington”?
James Young
So by “damage” you mean “using the same tactics that the Left has been using for decades.”
MB
James, it’s as if you’re being intentionally obtuse (and that couldn’t *possibly* be the case, could it?). Now, if I’m recalling correctly, you went to as decent a law school as I did (we’ll not hold that against them), which means that you probably had a number of classmates up for the DOJ Honors Program. Were they all liberals? Not bloody likely.
I know you and your fellow persecuteds like to think that it’s Liberals who are responsible for this world being so contrary to your fantasies. Sorry, they’re not. It’s reality that spoils it for you.