Oversight can produce results:
The Justice Department is removing political appointees from the hiring process for rookie lawyers and summer interns, amid allegations that the Bush administration had rigged the programs in favor of candidates with connections to conservative or Republican groups, according to documents and officials.
This nugget also from the Post, is worth following*:
According to a former deputy chief in the civil rights division, one honors hire was a University of Mississippi law school graduate who had been a clerk for U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. about the time the judge’s nomination by President Bush to a federal appeals court provoked opposition by congressional Democrats, who contended that Pickering was hostile to civil rights.
A few months after he arrived, that lawyer was given a cash award by the department, after he was the only member of a four-person team in the civil rights division who sided with a Georgia voter-identification law that was later struck down by the courts as discriminatory to minorities, according to two former Justice lawyers.
The cash payments are part of the Attorney General’s Awards, the highest honor bestowed by the Department of Justice.
Late update: For more on the Pickering clerk*, Joshua Rogers, see Paul Kiel’s earlier reporting over at TPMmuckraker.
Correction: While cash payments are associated with some of the Attorney General Awards, it does not appear that Joshua Rogers was the recipient of an Attorney General Award. The nature of the cash payment to Rogers remains unclear. I regret the error.
*Update/Correction: The Post has run the following correction to the piece:
An April 28 A-section article about the Attorney General’s Honors Program incorrectly said that one lawyer hired through the program had been a clerk for U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. The lawyer was a summer intern for Pickering while he was in law school.
