U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Kansas City

By Scott Horton

Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage is back firing on all pistons today with a thorough portrait of one of the crudest political hacks to surface in the Purgegate scandal so far: former deputy head of the Civil Rights Division at main Justice, and U.S. Attorney in Kansas City, Bradley Schlozman.

Savage bores into Schlozman’s violation of standing DOJ policies about commencing voting rights actions on the eve of an election.

That summer, the liberal activist group ACORN paid workers $8 an hour to sign up new voters in poor neighborhoods around the country. Later, ACORN’s Kansas City chapter discovered that several workers filled out registration forms fraudulently instead of finding real people to sign up. ACORN fired the workers and alerted law enforcement.

Schlozman moved fast, so fast that his office got one of the names on the indictments wrong. He announced the indictments of four former ACORN workers on Nov. 1, 2006, warning that “this national investigation is very much ongoing.” Missouri Republicans seized on the indictments to blast Democrats in the campaign endgame.

Critics later accused Schlozman of violating the Justice Department’s own rules. A 1995 Justice election crime manual says “federal prosecutors . . . should be extremely careful not to conduct overt investigations during the preelection period” to avoid “chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities” and causing “the investigation itself to become a campaign issue.”

“In investigating election fraud matters, the Justice Department must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself,” the manual states, adding in underlining that “most, if not all, investigation of alleged election crime must await the end of the election to which the allegation relates.”

The department said Schlozman’s office got permission from headquarters for the election-eve indictments. It added that the department interprets the policy as having an unwritten exception for voter registration fraud, because investigators need not interview voters for such cases.

Of course, the written policies don’t matter when you have an “unwritten exception,” freely crafted retrospectively whenever the need serves. This is how the Gonzales Justice Department works. It comes more and more to resemble George Orwell’s Animal Farm. To be specific, the point midway through the novel when the animals witness with their own eyes the first clear violation of the Seven Commandments. “But somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals’ memory. But they saw now that the Commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball.”  The Commandment said “No animal shall kill any other animal.” But the “unwritten exception” came with the addition of the words “without cause.”

Even more revealing is how Schlozman took a sledgehammer to the Civil Rights Division, a section which was first organized in the Eisenhower administration by my old mentor, Harold R. Tyler, and which was – pre-Schlozman – often considered a shining citadel of professionalism and integrity.

Schlozman also moved to take control of hiring for the voting rights section, taking advantage of a new policy that gave political appointees more control. Under Schlozman, the profile of the career attorneys hired by the section underwent a dramatic transformation.

Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65.

In other words, good-bye to the graduates of Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley and Texas, and welcome to the graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, provided they have appropriate Republican party credentials, of course. This is an exercise in the making of a hackocracy, or, in the closest historical parallel, Gleichschaltung.

So where is Bradley Schlozman today?  Well, he’s been recalled from Kansas City. He now is in the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorneys, where he can manipulate prosecutorial conduct all over the country. Reassuring, isn’t it?