Today’s Must ReadIf Monica Goodling “crossed the line,” as she famously admitted during congressional testimony last month, Bradley Schlozman appears to have flown over it.
The Washington Post focuses on Schlozman’s handling of the appellate section when he was a senior political appointee at the Civil Rights Division, and finds that even being a Republican wasn’t enough to assure Schlozman of a lawyer’s abilities — you had to be his kind of Republican:
Schlozman raised the question of partisan politics bluntly in the fall of 2004, they said, when asking appellate supervisors about the “loyalty” of division lawyer Angela Miller, who had once clerked for David. B. Sentelle, a conservative federal appeals judge. He told Miller’s bosses that he learned that she voted for McCain in the 2004 Republican primary and asked, “Can we still trust her?”He also warned section chief Diana Flynn that he would be keeping an eye on the legal work of another career lawyer who “didn’t even vote for Bush,” according to colleagues who said they heard Flynn describe the exchange. Miller told several of the colleagues that she considered Schlozman’s remarks a form of intimidation, and started looking for another job, the lawyers said.
Schlozman and several deputies also took an unusual interest in the assignment of office responsibility for appellate cases and, according to the lawyers and one of the supervisors, repeatedly ordered Flynn to take cases away from career lawyers with expertise and hand them to recent hires whose résumés listed membership in conservative groups, including the Federalist Society.
The Post also confirms something first reported by TPMmuckraker last week, that Schlozman had told a new hire in the appellate section that he was clearing out career lawyers in order to replace them with “good Americans.”