In the almost two years that TPMmuckraker has been covering the scandal over the removal of the U.S. attorneys, there have been many questions raised over the reasons behind the firings. On Monday, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General's report answered some of those, but raised others. While it concluded that only three of the firings were carried out for political reasons or to interfere with active prosecutions, it could not gather sufficient evidence to conclude the rest of the firings were politically based. Regardless, the report strongly condemned the DOJs overall mishandling of the firings, calling the process "fundamentally flawed . . unsystematic and arbitrary."

As we wrote earlier this week, the report reveals that Todd Graves, David Iglesias and Bud Cummins were fired for reasons of politics, not performance.

The report lays out the investigations into each of the remaining U.S. attorney firings, but repeatedly states that its analysis and investigation were "hindered" due to many witnesses' "lack of recall"; the refusal of many witnesses to cooperate with the investigation or give testimony; and the administration's stonewalling in disclosing documents. Citing these obstacles, the report hedges its findings, requesting a prosecutor to continue the investigation with the power to compel testimony.

In the case of Margaret Chiara, the former Western Michigan U.S. attorney, the report could find no evidence that the rumors that Chiara was in a lesbian relationship with one of her subordinates were behind her removal.

Chiara has stated publicly that she believes the rumors -- which she called "false and malicious" in a statement yesterday from her attorney -- were the reason for the loss of her position.

Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California, was believed to have been asked to resign over her prosecution of former Executive Director of the CIA, Dusty Foggo and Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who bribed former Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham and Foggo. But the report "found no evidence" to support those claims, stating that "the investigation and prosecution of Cunningham and Foggo were aggressively pursued by career prosecutors in Lam's office, both during and after her tenure."

Instead, the report supports the Department's previous claims that Lam was removed because of her poor statistics on gun and immigration prosecution statistics -- but blames the DOJ for poor handling of her removal.

In the case of Daniel Bogden of Nevada, little was known about his removal, except that he had not been diligent in prosecution of obscenity cases. The report found the claim to be behind Bogden's removal, but added some color to the removal. Interestingly, the report found that the complaints of Bodgen's dalliance in obscenity prosecutions were made by Brent Ward, the head of the DOJ Obscenity Prosecution Task Force -- who was friends with Attorney General Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson's brother and had direct conversations with Sampson regularly.

When questioned by the DOJ, Sampson stated he "did not recall whether those complaints played a role in the decision to remove Bogden," a response the report found "particularly suspect, given his role in the removal process."

In Arizona, Paul Charlton's termination was believed to be connected to his investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, but the report states that it could find no evidence to support that claim. Charlton had previously clashed with Main Justice on a decision he made to not seek the death penalty on a case involving a murder that transpired during a drug deal. Charlton believed it was this death penalty case as well as his policy of tape recording interrogations that led to his removal -- theories the IG report confirmed as the primary reasons for his dismissal.

Lastly, there is Seattle's John McKay who was believed to have been fired over his failure to prosecute voter fraud related to the 2004 Washington governor's election.

McKay famously received a call from Ed Cassidy, chief of staff to Washington Rep. Richard Hastings (R) asking about his prosecution, to which McKay responded, "Ed, I'm sure you're not about to start talking to me about the future direction of this case," after which Cassidy quickly ended the call.

Hastings claimed ignorance and told investigators that "he could not remember telling Cassidy to call McKay. . . or whether Cassidy had told him he had done so."

The report also mentions a meeting in Washington between McKay and White House Counsel Harriet Miers in which Miers reportedly asked McKay "why Republicans in the state of Washington were angry with him."

The report concludes that the "evidence suggests" that the primary reason for McKay's removal was an argument with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty over an information sharing program -- not because of failure to prosecute voter fraud as McKay conjectured.

The OIG report, though nearly 400 pages long, is far from comprehensive. The investigation lacked the power to compel testimony or documents outside of the Justice Department and were consequently limited in their investigation. As a result, the report is forced to reserve judgment on whether many of the firings were inappropriately political, though it recommends that a prosecutor be appointed to look into whether crimes were committed.

Nora Dannehy, appointed on Monday by Attorney General Michael Mukasey will take up that mantle. It remains to be seen if that will be enough to ferret the truth out of unwilling witnesses and departments.

New details provided by the IG report released yesterday, gives definition to former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves' termination and paints a clear case for a politicized firing orchestrated by the office of Missouri Sen. Kit Bond (R).

Graves was the last U.S. attorney to be counted among those fired through the work of Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales and Michael Battle, director of the Executive Office of the United States Attorney. His case differed from the others in many ways -- he was fired in January 2006, almost 11 months earlier than the other removed attorneys, and the circumstances around his dismissal were unclear.

But according to the report, Graves' removal was a result of multiple calls and emails from Bonds' legal counsel Jack Bartling, to members of White House Counsel -- who "kicked over" the complaints to the Justice Department.

Bond's problems with Graves' began in late fall of 2004. Bond's office had been having problems with another Missouri Congressman -- Rep. Sam Graves (R), U.S. Attorney Graves' brother. Between October and December 2004, a staffer from Bond's office reportedly called former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves to ask for his help in convincing his brother to fire his chief of staff. When Graves refused to intervene, the staffer told him "they could no longer protect [his] job," and hung up, according to the report.

Shortly after, in February 2005, Bartling began placing calls to the White House Counsel's office about Graves, pushing for a replacement. By the fall of 2005, the complaints had been passed to the Justice Department. In December, Bartling reached out again to Michael Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, who had interviewed Bartling when he had been applying for a position in that department.

In a call shortly before Graves' firing, Bartling asked Elston to, "'keep his ear to the
ground' to ensure that the Senator's role in requesting White House action on
Graves was not being disseminated within the Department," and make sure that Bonds name was never linked to Graves' ouster, the report states.

A little over a month later, Battle called Graves on January 24, 2006 to ask Graves for his resignation, acting on instructions from White House Liason Monica Goodling and using a speech similar to the one he would use with the other fired U.S. attorneys less than 11 months later.

While the IG report states that its investigation was significantly hindered by a number of witnesses refusal to cooperate and/or recall events, including that of Sampson, Goodling, members of the White House Counsel staff and Sen. Bond, it clearly states that they found Graves' firing to be directly a result of Bond's requests.

Acting on the report's findings, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed an ethics complaint this afternoon against Bond, stating that Sen. Bond and his staff violated Senate rules prohibiting "improper conduct which may reflect upon the Senate."

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and embattled former White House liaison Monica Goodling are among those newly named as defendants in a private class-action lawsuit against the DOJ.

The suit, Gerlich et al. v. Department of Justice, was orginally filed in response to the Inspector General's report on politicized hiring in the Attorney General's Honors Program. The report found that a number of DOJ officials, namely Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, had broken the law in basing hiring decisions based on political affiliations.

The amended lawsuit expands the defendant list from only the Justice Department to specific individuals. Besides Gonzales and Goodling, Elston and McDonald are also named as new defendants in the case.

The suit also added five new plaintiffs.

There are still two more uncompleted inspector general reports pending -- one about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys and another about political agendas in the department's Civil Rights Division.

Yet from the IG report Monday on hiring practices, it's already clear that a culture of partisanship prevailed inside the department, and many DOJ officials were playing along, some more actively than others.

"It had a significant effect throughout the department. I think one of the most significant things is people not objecting, people not standing up," Inspector General Glenn Fine told lawmakers today on Capitol Hill.

To be sure, Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson and others appear to have been serious party hacks who violated department policy and federal law by screening out prospective lawyers and judges for partisan reasons. But many others went along, if only more passively.

Take for example what Michael Elston told the IG's investigators. Elston clearly understood how Goodling and others operated and admitted to adopting a go-along, get-along attitude.

For example, Michael Elston, former Chief of Staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, stated that when he sought attorneys for details to the [Office of the Deputy Attorney General], he would generally look for candidates with the type of experience required by the position, but he also looked for candidates with Republican or conservative credentials in order to get them approved by the [Office of Attorney General].

Elston said that Goodling made it clear to him that she did not want Democrats detailed to the ODAG because she had a "farm system" approach to filling vacancies in the Department, and she wanted to "credential" Republicans so that they could move on to higher political positions.

We saw an example of this in an email sent by Bradley Schlozman, the U.S. Attorney for Missouri's western district. He was sending resumes for three prospective hires to DOJ headquarters. Apparently without any prompting, Schlozman began touting their political credentials.

In his e-mail, Schlozman described the three candidates as "rock-solid Americans" who would be a "hugely positive legacy for this Administration." Schlozman described each candidate in terms of their conservative political credentials. He wrote that the first applicant's "involvement with the Bush/Cheney campaign speaks for itself."

Yes, in some cases, Goodling and others actively screened out prospective lawyers and judges for partisan reasons. But in many situations, they didn't have to. Others did it for them.

It wasn't just Democrats who Monica Goodling was trying to rid the Justice Department of. If you were gay -- or even rumored to be gay -- your career was in jeopardy.

Today's IG report offers new details in the case of Assistant U.S. Attorney Leslie Hagen, whose tenure at Main Justice came to an end because Monica Goodling picked up on rumors that Hagen was gay and had an allegedly romantic relationship with her supervisor, the then-U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan, Margaret Chiara.

Hagen, whose case was first reported by NPR in April, is not identified by name in the IG's report. However, her attorney confirmed to TPMmuckraker this afternoon that Hagen is the unnamed, allegedly lesbian, AUSA detailed in the report.

"I think the report vindicates what she has been saying all along," said Lisa Banks of Katz, Marshall and Banks LLP. "That she was the victim of pernicious discrimination from Monica Goodling."

Hagen had worked as a federal prosecutor for Chiara in Michigan before being detailed to DOJ headquarters in Washington, where she she worked in the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA). When it was time to renew Hagen's detail to the EOUSA, Goodling blocked it, and prevented her from obtaining other details within DOJ as well.
Calling Goodling's actions "wholly inappropriate," the report concluded that Goodling broke federal law in discriminating based on sexual orientation.

The ostensible reason for the actions taken against Hagen were rumors that she had improperly benefited financially from the purported relationship with Chiara, in the form of large bonuses and trips with Chiara at government expense. The report concludes, however, that Goodling never substantiated the allegations of financial improprieties and that Hagen's rumored sexual orientation was the reason she was not allowed to remain at Main Justice. One of the witnesses cited in the report is Mary Beth Buchanan, the former executive director of the EOUSA who remains the U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh:

Buchanan said that Goodling told her that the AUSA and the U.S. Attorney were involved in a relationship, and that it would not be appropriate for the Department to do anything to further that relationship, such as employing them in the same geographic area. According to Buchanan, at that time the U.S. Attorney was trying to find a position in the Washington, D.C. area. Buchanan said she understood that Goodling was telling her not to select the AUSA because it would look like the Department was sanctioning the homosexual relationship.

As to the veracity of the rumors that surrounded Hagen and Chiara, Hagen's attorney described them as "completely false" in the interview with TPMmuckraker. "There was nothing to verify that my client was gay -- she never identified as such," Banks said. "The supposed relationship between her and the U.S. attorney was completely false, and nothing more than co-workers and friends. There was no improper relationship. No improper government trips. No improper bonuses."

Calls to Chiara's office were not immediately returned.

It's not clear what, if any, light the Hagen episode shines on the firing of Chiara as U.S. attorney. The professed reasons for the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys have never been very clear, but the circumstances surrounding Chiara's removal have been especially murky. Appointed U.S. attorney in 2001, she was asked to resign by Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, in November 2006. That was more than a month before the seven other U.S. attorneys were fired, in calls from Michael Battle, who had succeeded Buchanan as the executive director of the EOUSA. Chiara's resignation was effective March 16, 2007.

The official, albeit vague, reasons for Chiara's firing were "poor management issues" and a "loss of confidence by career individuals," according to then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in testimony to the Senate. But there was scant documentation within DOJ of Chiara's alleged problems.

In the absence of a more substantial explanation from the justice Department for Chiara's firing, it's not unreasonable to wonder if the rumors of her lesbian relationship with Hagen led to Chiara's downfall, too.

As a Republican source told NPR, "To some people, that's even worse than being a Democrat."

After the news that a class action suit had been filed against former Justice Department officials Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, we've been waiting for the other shoe shoe to drop: bar complaints.

Sure enough, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed complaints in the wake of the Inspector Generals report that found both McDonald and Elston in violation of federal law for taking "political and ideological" affiliations into account when hiring for the U.S. Attorney's Honors Program:

The Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit attorneys from engaging in conduct involving dishonesty and conduct that "seriously interferes with the administration of justice." By illegally taking political and ideological affiliations into account in screening applicants for career DOJ position, Mr. Elston and Ms. McDonald may have violated bar rules could be subject to discipline.

CREW's executive director Melanie Sloane told TPMmuckraker that due to the findings of the independent OIG report, the complaint should be taken fairly seriously. "The only question left for the bar is whether their violations of the law rise to level of professional responsibility," Sloane said. "And I bet that they do."

The complaint was filed, with the OIG report attached, against McDonald in the District of Columbia and Elston in Virginia. Copies of the complaint were sent to all other jurisdictions where they were bar members.

It was bound to happen when you had a big mess of lawyers disqualified from hiring for illegal reasons. One of the de-selected masses filed a lawsuit claiming $100,000 in damages on Monday.

As the The Blog of Legal Times wrote yesterday:

The class action by Sean Gerlich -- filed yesterday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia -- is the first suit resulting from an internal Justice report issued last week that says two former Justice officials illegally screened applicants to the honors and summer intern programs.

The two officials were Esther Slater McDonald, then counsel to the associate attorney general and now an associate at Seyfarth Shaw, and Michael Elston, then chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and now a partner at McGuireWoods.

Gerlich's suit says the department politicized the selection process, mishandled the applications and failed to maintain the records, all in violation of the Privacy Act, the Civil Service Reform Act and the Federal Records Act. In addition, the suit claims violations of the First and 14th Amendments.

Gerlich says he was rejected because of his liberal affiliations, which officials dug up through Internet searches.

Only two people were tagged in the DOJ Inspector General's report (pdf) released yesterday for having violated federal law and department policy by screening applicants for career positions based on "political or ideological" factors.

One, Michael Elston, the former chief of staff for the deputy attorney general, we've already heard plenty about and has been in the mix since almost the moment the story of the politicization of DOJ broke. But the other, Esther Slater McDonald, is new to the DOJ name-game.

So who is she?

The IG report covers the time in which McDonald served as counsel to Associate Attorney General Bill Mercer, a short time frame of just thirteen months. But though she was there just a little over a year, McDonald's name peppers the OIG report (pdf) over 100 times. She was deeply involved in trying to ferret out the political leanings of applicants. The report describes her frequent Internet searches of applicants to determine if they were "anarchists" or "leftists."

When [Daniel] Fridman, [an assistant U.S. Attorney and fellow Screening Committee member] asked McDonald how she obtained the additional information, she told him she conducted searches on Google and MySpace, and read law review articles written by the applicants. For example, Fridman recalled that one candidate had written a law review article about the detention of individuals at Guantánamo, and McDonald noted on the application that she perceived the applicant's viewpoint to be contrary to the position of the administration. On another application, McDonald noted that she found information on the Internet indicating that a candidate was an "anarchist."

So where did this human resources wunderkind come from in the first place?

McDonald, who arrived at DOJ in September 2006, was part of the crowd of young DOJ hires who came in during the second Bush term after Alberto Gonzales moved from White House counsel to attorney general. They had limited experience, fierce loyalty to President Bush and sterling conservative credentials.

According to McDonald's LinkedIn profile, she's an alum of Pensacola Christian College and Notre Dame Law School. After graduating in 2003, she worked for Jones Day before being ushered into the hallowed halls of Gonzales' DOJ by none other than the Monica Goodling herself:

On June 13, 2006, a partner at the law firm e-mailed Monica Goodling to recommend McDonald for a position at the Department. Goodling interviewed McDonald later that week. McDonald was hired as a political appointee as Counsel to Acting Associate Attorney General Mercer and began work on September 5, 2006.

Goodling, who would later be forced to resign as part of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was another young inexperienced DOJ official. She had done her undergraduate work at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and graduated from law school at Pat Robertson's Regent University. At age 33, she served as a liaison between DOJ and the White House.

McDonald's new job included assisting with oversight of DOJ grant programs, the Antitrust Division, and the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees. Within weeks, Mercer assigned her to the Honors Program/SLIP Screening Committee, which would ultimately be her downfall. Goodling was happy with the choice, according to Elston:

Elston said that when he informed Goodling that McDonald was to be on the Committee, Goodling "seemed pleased that Esther had been picked and said something to the effect 'well, she's had experience in this sort of thing.'"

It's not clear what experience Goodling was referring to, but McDonald got to work screening applicants for their fealty to conservative ideology. On one occasion, McDonald marked three candidates as unacceptable, because of their "leftist" views. As she wrote in an email at the time to Fridman and Elston:

Poverty & Race Research Council actively works to extend racial discrimination through increased affirmative action and, while there, [the candidate] helped draft document arguing that federal law requires recipients of federal funding to seek actively to discriminate in favor of minorities (racial, language, and health) rather than merely to treat all applicants equally; Greenaction is an extreme organization founded by Greenpeace members and promoting civil disobedience and engaging in violence in protests, and the organization adheres to the Principles of Environmental Justice, which are positively ridiculous (e.g., recognizing 'our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth' and 'oppos[ing] military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms'); [the candidate] also is/was a member of Greenpeace; [the candidate's] essay is filled with leftist commentary and buzz words like 'environmental justice' and 'social justice.' [emphasis ours]

Within months her work on the Screening Committee would come under scrutiny. When first contacted for an interview by the OIG in September 2007, McDonald agreed. But then she postponed the interview so she could secure counsel. A new interview date was set for October 25, 2007, but department investigators would never get to interview McDonald.

At end of business day on October 24, McDonald's attorney sent an email to investigators, informing them that his client was canceling the interview and was no longer an employee of the Justice Department:

We learned that McDonald had resigned from the Department, effective October 24. On the evening of October 23, she had told her supervisor, Acting Associate Attorney General Katsas, that the next day would be her last day at the Department. Katsas said that her resignation came as a surprise to him.

Since leaving DOJ, she has been working as an associate at the D.C. law firm, Seyfarth Shaw.

We already knew that Michael Elston, chief of staff to the Deputy Attorney General and former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, weren't best buds. Their acrimonious phone calls over her December 2006 firing as U.S. attorney for San Diego are well known, but according to the DOJ Inspector General's report issued today, the two butted heads as early as October 2006, over the "deselection" of a young attorney for the Justice Department Honor's Program.

On October 11, 2006, Lam sent an email to Elston inquiring as to why a candidate, an honors graduate from Stanford Law School who had held a Federal clerkship, was unqualified. Lam told the OIG that she suspected the candidate was deselected because of a previous article she had written on gender discrimination in the military, and because the judge she clerked for was a Clinton appointee.

From the report (pdf):

Elston replied by e-mail that most deselections were for poor grades. He acknowledged, however, that poor grades did not appear to be the issue with this candidate, and he offered to check into the application and let Lam know whether an appeal would be successful.

Elston replied later that day: "I have reviewed her application materials, Carol. I do not think an appeal will be successful. If it helps, she was not selected by the other components to which she applied."

Lam responded: "Thanks Mike. Just curious, though - I don't see anything unacceptable in her online application that was made available to us. Do the other components see something that I don't?"

Elston replied: "Not that I know of, Carol."

Elston was found by the report to be in violation of federal law for hiring candidates on "political and ideological" grounds.

Before leaping to the conclusion that Lam's firing, which has yet to be fully explained, was prompted by the honors program dispute, keep in mind that Lam's name appeared on a preliminary list of U.S. attorneys to be fired as early as January 2006. She was then fired in December of that year, one of eight U.S. attorneys asked to resign by the Justice Department, but one of the only ones (at least initially) to put up a fight. At the time she was asked to leave, Lam was in the midst of securing indictments on CIA operative Dusty Foggo and defense contractor Brent Wilkes.

In today's report on bias in hiring practices at the Department of Justice, the Office of the Inspector General found Michael Elston "violated federal law" by deselecting candidates based on their liberal affiliations:

As explained below, we concluded that Elston violated federal law and Department policy by deselecting candidates based on their liberal affiliations. First, the data analysis indicates that highly qualified candidates with liberal or Democratic Party affiliations were deselected at a much higher rate than highly qualified candidates with conservative or Republican Party affiliations. Second, Elston admitted that he may have deselected candidates in a few instances due to their affiliations with certain liberal causes.

The DOJ IG report released this morning, besides providing some memorable quotes on woodland creatures, also gave some valuable statistics on the biased hiring practices of Honor Program attorneys.

The nomination process for attorneys had two stages. First, individual offices in DOJ reviewed applications and selected certain ones for interviews. Then, a Screening Committee selected by the deputy attorney general reviewed the selections and made nominations for final interviews. This was a change made in 2002 when the "involvement of political appointees at the Department in the hiring process was greatly expanded."

The OIG broke down nominees into those that they classified as "Liberal," "Conservative" and "Neutral."* They then evaluated the deselection (removal from the hiring process) rate of those nominees between 2002 and 2007. They found a strikingly high percentage of identifiable liberals who were culled from the process compared to identifiable conservatives.

For example, in 2002, of the 100 "liberals" nominated, 80% were "deselected" by the Screening Committee. Of the 46 "conservatives" nominated, only 9% were deselected.

Chart 3 of the report (pdf) details the discrepancy:

Perhaps even more disturbing, of the 71 candidates who were deemed "Highly Qualified" (attended a top 20 ranked law school, were in the top 20% of their class and had previously held judicial clerkships and were members of the law review), 37% were deselected.

And the kicker?

15 out of the 17 highly qualified candidates who were categorized as "Liberal" were deselected. Zero of the five highly qualified "Conservative" candidates were deselected.

But it gets better and better!

Overall, of the applicants nominated, 70% of those who identified as Democrats were de-selected, 32% who identified as Neutral were deselected, and just 11% who identified as Republicans were deselected.

The Screening Committee was an amorphous group, and as the OIG describes, DOJ offices that sent their recommendations to the Screening Committee, often did not know how the Committee members were selected, who sat on it, or the Committee's criteria in selecting or deselecting candidates.

So who was on the elusive committee?

In 2002, the OIG determined that "Andrew Hruska, then Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, and David Higbee, then Deputy Associate Attorney General, participated in the screening process, and that Howard Nielson, then Counselor to the Attorney General, and Adam Ciongoli, then Counselor to the Attorney General, may also have participated in the screening process."

[Late Update: Chief of Staff for the Deputy Attorney General, Michael Elston was named in the report as being in violation of federal laws for weighing "political and ideological" leanings in the hiring process. Elston and Esther McDonald, a former DOJ lawyer, were both found in violation of DOJ policy.]
____
* From a footnote in the OIG's report on political designations assigned to candidates:

"We recognize that these determinations are not precise and that categorizing organizations as liberal or conservative can be somewhat subjective. The appendix contains a listing of those organizations we categorized as liberal or conservative in our analysis of the candidates' affiliations. For example, we categorized as "liberal" organizations promoting causes such as choice in abortion issues, gay rights, defense of immigrants, separation of church and state, and privacy rights. Examples of organizations we considered liberal include Earthjustice, the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, Lambda Law Association, and Ayuda. We categorized as "conservative" groups promoting causes such as defense of religious liberty, traditional family values, free enterprise, limited government, and right to life issues. Examples of groups we considered conservative include the Federalist Society, the Alliance Defense Fund, the Christian Legal Society, and the Family Research Council. In reviewing candidates' applications, we considered a candidate's affiliations to be "neutral" if the organizations listed did not have an apparent liberal or conservative viewpoint, or if the candidate listed affiliations with both liberal and conservative organizations."

Inspector General Glenn Fine's report on the politicization of the Justice Department's Honors Program was just released, and states that the OIG did find evidence -- surprise! -- that politics and ideology were weighed in the selection of candidates, but that only Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, and Esther McDonald, former counsel to Associate Attorney General and member of Honors Program Screening Committee, were involved.

From (pdf) the report:

The evidence in our investigation - including the documentary evidence, the testimony of witnesses, and the analysis of the applications of candidates who were selected for interviews and who were deselected by the 2006 Screening Committee - supports the conclusion that political or ideological affiliations were used to deselect candidates from the Honors Program and SLIP.

As discussed below, we concluded that while Daniel Fridman did not use political or ideological affiliations in his evaluation of candidates, the evidence indicates that both McDonald and Elston did. As a result, many qualified candidates were deselected by the Screening Committee because of their perceived political or ideological affiliations.

McDonald, who worked with Fridman (an assistant U.S. Attorney from the
Southern District of Florida who was detailed to the deputy AG's office) to screen applications before they were sent to Elston, would often notate the applicants ideology (from page 73):

When Fridman asked McDonald how she obtained the additional information, she told him she conducted searches on Google and MySpace, and read law review articles written by the applicants. For example, Fridman recalled that one candidate had written a law review article about the detention of individuals at Guantánamo, and McDonald noted on the application that she perceived the applicant's viewpoint to be contrary to the position of the administration. On another application, McDonald noted that she found information on the Internet indicating that a candidate was an "anarchist."

We'll have more on this as we look over the 110-page report today.

[Late Update: Chief of Staff for the Deputy Attorney General, Michael Elston was named in the report as being in violation of federal laws for weighing "political and ideological" leanings in the hiring process. Elston and Esther McDonald, a former DOJ lawyer, were both found in violation of DOJ policy.]