Today’s Must ReadI’m not sure if this qualifies as ironic or just sadly fitting.
As we’ve attempted to document here, the Civil Rights Division has been the focus of the most dramatic effort at politicization in the Justice Department. Career lawyers, harassed and discouraged, have left in droves, while political appointees like Bradley Schlozman have stocked the division with stark conservatives.
So this will come as no surprise.
ABC’s Washington D.C. affiliate WJLA-TV crunched some numbers in the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section — the section charged with prosecuting the worst civil rights offenses like hate crimes. And here’s what they found:
The I-Team has learned that since 2003…the criminal section within the Civil Rights Division has not hired a single black attorney to replace those who have left. Not one.
As a result, the current face of civil rights prosecutions looks like this: Out of fifty attorneys in the Criminal Section – only two are black. The same number the criminal section had in 1978 – even though the size of the staff has more than doubled.
As Richard Ugelow, the former deputy section chief of the employment section in the Civil Rights Division puts it, “We would sue employers for having numbers like that.” Ugelow, you might have guessed, is one of the dozens of career lawyers who have left the division in the past six years.
So that’s how bad it is in the division’s criminal section. But what about the voting section, which is charged with defending the voting rights of minorities? That’s the section that bore the brunt of Schlozman’s obsession with voter fraud. Well, we know Schlozman did an outstanding job hiring Federalist Society members. But as for hiring blacks? Probably not so well.
House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) says that his committee will launch an investigation of the Civil Rights Division’s hiring practices. Presumably this will be a complementary probe to the one of Bradley Schlozman’s efforts to conceal the hiring of Republicans in the division. There’s plenty to go around.
Note: The Justice Department responded to WJLA-TV’s story by saying that the Civil Rights Division as a whole is the most diverse office in the Department of Justice.
