DoJ Lawyer: Controversial Prosecutor Played Politics at DepartmentWhen Ty Clevenger, a line attorney in the Civil Rights Division, forwarded a friend’s resume to deputy division chief Bradley Schlozman, he was expecting questions about his friend’s experience as a lawyer. But what Schlozman wanted to know, according to Clevenger, was whether his friend was a Republican.
Clevenger, a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association, told Schlozman that his friend was conservative. He just wasn’t sure how active his friend was politically. The friend never got an interview.
It’s the most direct account yet of politicization at the Justice Department. There have been many other signs — and not just the administration’s preference for “loyal Bushies” as U.S. attorneys. Last week, a group of anonymous Justice Department employees wrote to the House and Senate judiciary committees to complain about politicization in the department’s hiring process. The deputy attorney general’s office, they alleged, was screening department applicants to eliminate Democrats.
“We take allegations like this one very seriously,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) told me, reacting to Clevenger’s account. “Specific to the Civil Rights Division, we are investigating complaints of politicization both in hiring and prosecutions. The Justice Department is not the place for this type of political cronyism, and we will get to the bottom of it.”
Clevenger, who graduated from Stanford Law School in 2001, told me that he came to work at the Civil Rights Division when a friend, also a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA), asked him if he’d be interested working there. Clevenger said yes and gave him his resume. Relatively soon, he received a call from Schlozman, then the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, who asked him to come in for an interview.
It’s certainly not surprising that the RNLA was used as a recruiting ground for the division — as McClatchy detailed last month, at least 25 members of the RNLA work in the Justice Department, including at least 10 in the Civil Rights Division.
But apparently membership in the RNLA was not the only way that Schlozman gauged applicants. In an interview with McClatchy last month, Schlozman claimed that he’d tried to “depoliticize the hiring process” at the Civil Rights Division.
But Clevenger found quite the opposite to be the case.
Not long after he was hired as a line attorney at the division’s Special Litigation Section, he decided to refer a friend from Stanford to Schlozman. The friend had practiced employment law for several years and Clevenger thought he’d do well at the division, which has an employment litigation section.
But when Schlozman called back, “he wanted to know if [my friend] was a Republican.” Clevenger couldn’t remember the exact words Schlozman used, but said “it was very clear. It was something like, ‘Is he one of us? Is he friendly?’
“I told him that I didn’t know that he was actively Republican, I wasn’t sure what his political credentials are. That was clearly what Schlozman wanted to know.”
Apparently those were the wrong answers. “He didn’t get hired. He never even got an interview. He would have been very well qualified. I figured he just wasn’t Republican enough.”
Schlozman left the Civil Rights Division in March of last year to be installed as the U.S. Attorney for western Missouri. He was appointed shortly after the Patriot Act reauthorization bill was passed — the bill contained a provision that allowed the attorney general to appoint U.S. attorneys for an indefinite period. He remained in that post for more than a year, a controversial tenure — Schlozman brought four voter fraud indictments, for instance, just days before the election last year, leading to charges that he was attempting to influence the election. The adminstration finally nominated a permanent replacement in January of this year, just two days before Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Though Schlozman left office only last week, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney Office in western Missouri said that he had not left contact information. Even his home telephone number in Kansas City had been disconnected.
For his part, Clevenger was abruptly terminated from the division on October 5, 2006, little more than a year after he’d joined. The reason? The day before, he’d sent a detailed letter (you can read it here) to the deputy attorney general’s office complaining about the “abusive” behavior of his section chief toward attorneys, interns, and others. When he came to work on the 5th, he found that his office had been searched and was soon told that he’d be fired if he did not resign.
Clevenger is currently pursuing a whistleblower action against the division, charging that he was wrongfully terminated.
