In forwarding a résumé in 2006 from a lawyer who was working for the Federalist Society, Ms. Goodling sent an e-mail message to the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury, saying: “Am attaching a résumé for a young, conservative female lawyer.” Ms. Goodling interviewed the woman and wrote in her notes such phrases as “pro-God in public life,” and “pro-marriage, anti-civil union.” The woman was eventually hired as a career prosecutor.

Such consideration of political views would have been allowed in hiring candidates to political appointments, which make up a tiny part of the Justice Department’s 110,000 employees, but it was clearly banned under both Civil Service law and the Justice Department’s internal policies, the inspector general said.

The problem appears to have predated Ms. Goodling’s rise at the Justice Department. In one episode cited in 2004, when John Ashcroft was attorney general, Ms. Goodling’s predecessor as White House liaison, Susan Richmond, blocked the deputy attorney general’s office from extending the stint of one lawyer because she felt that the job should be filled by a political appointee loyal to Mr. Bush, the report said.

Stuart Levey, an aide in the deputy attorney general’s office, summed up his frustration in an e-mail message recounting his inability to keep the lawyer in his office. “I also probed whether there is something negative about him that I did not know,” Mr. Levey wrote. “Turns out there is: he is a registered Democrat,” he wrote, and Jan Williams, an official in the White House, “thinks everyone in the leadership offices should have some demonstrated loyalty to the President. She all but said that he should pack his bags and get out of Dodge by sunset.”

Such political consideration grew even more rampant when Ms. Goodling became White House liason in 2006. Ms. Goodling, with the apparent backing of Mr. Gonzales’ office, was able to override the wishes and recommendations of more experienced officials who far outranked her on paper. And her political influence in hiring decisions became so well known within the department that it generated complaints from senior officials who believed it was improper, long before the issue became a public controversy in 2007 following the firings of nine United States attorneys. The inspector general concluded that Ms. Goodling knew that questioning applicants to career positions about their political beliefs was improper.

In one case, for instance, Ms. Goodling slowed the hiring of a prosecutor in the United States attorney’s office in Washington D.C. for a vacancy because she said she was concerned that he was a “liberal Democrat.” After the United States attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, complained to her supervisors, he was allowed to hire the candidate anyway.

In another case, colleagues said that Ms. Goodling blocked the appointment of a female prosecutor in Washington because she believed the lawyer was involved in a lesbian relationship with her supervisor, according to the report. Ms. Goodling had heard unfounded rumors that the lawyer, Leslie Hagan, was having a relationship with her boss, Margaret Chiara, who was the United States attorney for the western district of Michigan, according to Ms. Hagan’s lawyer. Ms. Chiara was one of the nine United States attorneys fired from their posts for reasons that were never made clear to them. Some officials suggested that Ms. Chiara’s link to the case and Ms. Goodling’s objections may now explain her abrupt dismissal.

“There was no romantic relationship,” said Lisa Banks, the attorney for Ms. Hagan, “but the rumors were pernicious and grew legs, and it cost her the job.”