Justice Department blackballed liberal lawyers, report says

MSNBC.COM
DEEP BACKGROUND: NBC NEWS INVESTIGATES
Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 12:58 PM PT
Filed Under: Politics

Imagine you are first in your class at Georgetown Law School, had clerked for two federal judges and been the articles editor on a law journal. You’d think you had a pretty good chance at getting an entry-level job as a lawyer at the Justice Department, right?
Not so fast, big shot. The Georgetown Law graduate was turned down, along with a Harvard Law student who had graduated in the top 5 percent of his Harvard undergraduate class, and a Yale Law School standout who had clerked for a federal judge and graduated summa cum laude from Yale College.
Their perceived deficiencies? They were all rejected by the Bush Administration Justice Department because of some affiliation with liberal groups or Democratic Party causes, according to a stinging new report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General (IG) and the Office of Professional Responsibility.
The 115-page report examines the selection of candidates for the Attorney General’s Honors Program and the Summer Law Intern Program from 2002 to 2006. Allegations regarding politicization of the prestigious programs received widespread public attention a year ago after an anonymous group of Justice Department officials wrote a letter to Congress complaining about alleged hiring-practice abuses.
“Political affiliations were used”Indeed, the IG investigation released Tuesday concludes that “political or ideological affiliations were used to deselect candidates from the Honors Program” and the summer intern program in many of the years reviewed. Members of the screening committee were asked to weed out "wackos" and ideological "extremists," the report found. Even one candidate’s belief that wolves should be re-introduced onto federal lands was noted in his review.
Esther McDonaldThe report is particularly critical of a low-ranking Justice Department lawyer named Esther Slater McDonald, who abruptly resigned from the DOJ last year on the same day that investigators from the Inspector General’s office were scheduled to interview her. She turned down all subsequent interview requests.
The investigators report that McDonald was hired as a political appointee at the Justice Department just three years out of law school. She was assigned to work on the screening committee for the Honors Program and the internship pool, and promptly began doing computer searches on the candidates “for organizations to which candidates belonged,” the report states. In a Nov. 29, 2007 email, McDonald blackballed three candidates “based on her objections to the candidates’ ideological affiliations,” the IG writes. She wrote despairingly in the email of Greenpeace and another group which “increased affirmative action,” and described one applicant’s essay as “filled with leftist commentary and buzz words like ‘environmental justice’ and ‘social justice.’ " She also wrote: “Leftists usually refer to achieving ‘social justice’ or ‘making policy’ or anything else that involves legislating rather than enforcing.”
Under Justice Department regulations and civil service law, it is improper to consider politics or political affiliation when hiring for DOJ career positions, such as the Honors Program and the intern program.
McDonald works now as an attorney in private practice, at the Seyfarth Shaw law firm in Washington, DC. She would not comment on the IG report, when contacted by NBC News. [To view the entire story, go to: http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/24/1164379.aspx ]