Today’s Must ReadYou can always count on lawyers to produce the most precise non-denial denials.
The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Justice Department had decided to return control of the hiring process to career lawyers in the department. Why? Because, a spokesman explained, after four years of political appointees having control of the process, those in charge have finally realized that there’s something of an appearance problem.
But the department was quick to deny that politics had had anything to do with who has been hired over the past four years. No, sir. And here comes that finely parsed denial:
“The Justice Department does not, nor has it ever, solicited any information from applicants … about their political affiliation or orientation.”
The key to that denial, you might have guessed, lies in that word, “solicit.”
Here’s how the hiring process went last year, according to a group of anonymous Justice Department employees who’ve complained to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees: all candidates selected for an interview had to be cleared by the deputy attorney general’s office. The employees were shocked when they sent up a list of 600 names and got back a list of 400. They demanded a meeting with the deputy attorney general’s chief of staff, Michael Elston, who coolly informed them that “inappropriate information about them on the Internet” had disqualified a number of applicants. So after the meeting, the employees searched online and found out what had been so inappropriate. Most of the disqualified applicants were Democrats.
When that story broke last week, the Justice Department had the same non-denial denial: “”the department does not solicit any information about applicants’ political affiliations or orientation.”
But that wasn’t the allegation. As the higher-ups at the department know full well, it would be totally inappropriate for the Justice Department to ask an applicant for his/her political affiliation. So they didn’t. Instead, a small group of people in the deputy attorney general’s office googled every applicant to find the information they’d been unable to solicit.
Very clever, huh?
Now, sometimes there was no need to go to the trouble of all that internet research. There’s evidence that there have been other methods of ascertaining whether an applicant was suited to work in Bush’s Justice Department — like recruiting through the Republican National Lawyers Association or simply asking around to see whether the applicant has the right stuff.
But here’s the real question. John Ashcroft put political appointees in charge of the hiring process in 2002. And for four years the department has been pumped full of Federalist Society members, so that in some departments (e.g. the Civil Rights Division), the career staff are indistinguishable from the political appointees. With Congress bearing down, the leadership in the Justice Department has finally decided to relinquish control of the hiring. But perhaps that decision is made easier because the mission has already been accomplished?