I shouldn’t be astonished by the fidelity with which the mainstream press has adhered to the conservative narrative on the New Black Panther Party case, but I genuinely am. [[THIS SENTENCE DOESN’T MAKE SENSE? WHAT DOES DROPPING THE CASE HAVE TO DO WITH THE BATON, AND WHO IS SUGGESTING THE TWO THINGS ARE RELATED, AND WHY? The idea that the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case after obtaining a preliminary injunction against the only NBPP member who had a baton is comparable to the culture of politicization that existed during the prior administration is bizarre.]] It’s like watching a goldfish in a bowl circling the same castle and forgetting it was there each time. Do we not remember the ongoing, perpetual scandal that was the Bush administration’s Department of Justice?
We could start with the Civil Rights Division. The men that ran that place like political fiefdom rather than a national trust met deserved ends. Bradley Schlozman was disgraced by an internal DoJ report found that he violated civil service laws [[THAT BANNED? against]] considering political affiliation in hiring and then lied to Congress about it. Voting Section Chief John Tanner resigned [[PROBABLY SHOULD JUST SAY WHAT HE SAID after making racially charged comments.]] [[WHEW, THIS SENTENCE IS LONG! I’D BREAK IT UP AFTER BLOCKED, AND THEN EXPLAIN OBAMA’S INVOLVEMENT AND THE REASON IN THE NEXT SENTENCE Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Hans von Spakovsky, who had spent his entire career trying to make it harder for non-Republican constituencies to vote–even to the point of doing so pseudonymously–had his appointment to the Federal Election Commission blocked by then-Senator Barack Obama after a group of his former colleagues filed a letter formally opposing his appointment because of his involvement in politicized hiring and enforcement in the Civil Rights Division.]] He NOW SPENDS HIS TIME accusing the Justice Department of being racist against white people over at National Review.
There were the quixotic voter fraud crusades. The politicized hiring. The lax civil rights enforcement.
The thing is, the Bush administration’s politicization of the Justice Department didn’t stop there. There was the effort to replace U.S. Attorneys who refused to pursue politically motivated prosecutions. Political appointees in the Civil Rights Division screened potential hires for conservative loyalties–but the practice wasn’t limited to that division. Bush-era employees like Monica Goodling, Jan Williams, and Kyle Sampson applied political litmus tests to the hiring of employees throughout the department.
[[SOMETHING MORE TRANSITION-Y HERE LIKE, THE POLITICIANIZATION DIDN’T EVEN STOP THERE The politicization didn’t end with the applications of political litmus tests in hiring or in selective enforcement of civil rights laws.]] Has everyone one forgotten then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales‘ trip to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft‘s sickbed to get approval of the warrantless wiretapping program, in order to avoid scrutiny from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility? What about his subsequent laughable testimony to Congress insisting that he could not recall the details of any of the major scandals in the Justice Department Congress had been investigating?
Even after all this, arguably the Justice Department’s biggest and most lasting disgrace was the approval of torture techniques for use against suspected terrorists. The Office of Legal Counsel, meant to be the first line of defense against executive overreach, became a rubberstamp for the Bush administration’s most lawless excesses. Torture techniques once used by Chinese Communists became American torture techniques. The first casualty of the right’s knee-jerk reversal of “politicization” accusations was the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head the damaged OLC. Johnsen’s nomination was blocked because she had the temerity to suggest that torture should never have been approved, which made her an “ideologue.”
There were responsible lawyers in the Bush administration too–people like Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey, and even Michael Mukasey, who restored the hiring standards that existed prior to the Bush administration–who tried to do the right thing. The left was right to be angry about what the Bush administration had done–but it was often indiscriminate in its criticisms.
The current administration’s Justice Department hasn’t been entirely above politics–the selective nature of the torture prosecutions and the handling of the 9/11 conspirators comes to mind–but it’s not even close. The Bush administration’s stewardship of the Department of Justice was a nightmare. Political appointees completely abdicated their responsibility to place law enforcement above politics. Only a few years later we seem to have forgotten what “politicization” really looks like, all because the Justice Department decided not TO [[I THINK “USE” IS BETTER HERE deploy]] a law meant to stop a large-scale voter suppression campaign against some jerk who stood outside a polling place in 2008 holding a baton.
