Systematic partisan-influenced hiring by the Department of Justice was revealed Monday following the release of an audit by the Justice Department's Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility. The report revealed that several aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales selected Justice Department employees, including career prosecutors, based on their partisan preferences, therefore violating Federal Law.



The report focuses on the hiring practice of White House liaison for Gonzalez, Monica Goodling, who "improperly subjected candidates for certain career positions to the same politically based evaluation she used on candidates for political positions," the report read.

"This resulted in high-quality candidates for important department positions being rejected because of improper political considerations," Inspector General Glenn Fine said.

Allegations of intervention by the Bush administration into the Justice Department have been a topic of significant debate on Capitol Hill following the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. The scandal culminated in the resignation of Bush loyalist and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in September 2007.

His successor, current Attorney General Michael Mukasey, said he was "disturbed" with the findings.

"I have said many times, both to members of the public and to department employees, it is neither permissible nor acceptable to consider political affiliations in the hiring of career department employees," he said in a statement.

Mukasey said that the Justice Department has since taken steps to ensure that similar discriminatory hiring practices will not happen in the future.

"Over the course of the last year and a half, the Justice Department has made many institutional changes to remedy the problems discussed in today's report, and the report itself commends these changes," he said. "It is crucial that the American people have confidence in the propriety of what we do and how we do it, and I will continue my efforts to make certain they can have such confidence."

In June, a report from the DOJ and OPR unveiled a screening program that rejected DOJ applicants who were liberal or had Democratic ties regardless of experience. Instead, those hired tended to be Republicans, often rookies with far less experience than their Democratic counterparts.



"Troubling" is the term Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy used to describe the June report.

"It confirms our findings and our fears that the same senior Department officials involved with the firing of United States Attorneys were injecting improper political motives into the process of hiring young attorneys," the Vermont Democrat said in a statement.

"I suspect further reports from the Inspector General will continue to shed light on the extent to which the Bush administration has allowed to affect - and infect - the Department's priorities, from law enforcement to the operation of the crucial Civil Rights Division to the Department's hiring practices," he added.

The reports are part of a wider investigation by the Justice Department into the Bush administration's firing of the nine attorney generals, including the role of partisan politics in certain cases such as voting and civil rights cases.

However, Gonzales maintains that he was unaware of any partisan-influenced hiring, a point the report did not dispute.

"It's simply not possible for any cabinet officer to be completely aware of and micromanage the activities of staffers, particularly where they don't inform him of what's going on," the former Attorney General's lawyer George Terwilliger III said in a statement.

The White House was similarly dismissive, with spokesman Tony Fratto saying, "There really is not a lot new here."

Neither Goodling nor Kyle Sampson, another aide under fire, will face departmental penalties because they no longer work at the Justice Department. Additionally, the report gives no indication whether anyone involved in the discriminatory hiring will face any charges.

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