And why, exactly, is the DoJ keeping tabs on which applicants are “identifiably liberal” anyway? Has this always been the policy?

As for the substance of the remarks…

Keep in mind that what you’re linking/pasting is an example of individuals who have been accused of illegal activity trying to cover their asses. Of course they’re going to say that they only wanted to level the playing field, or whatever.

On the other hand, if five times as many liberals are being nominated for the positions, it seems even stranger that an inordinate amount of the actual positions are going to conservatives. For example, if twenty males and one hundred females were recommended for twenty positions, and all twenty males and no females got them, wouldn’t you agree that something fishy is going on…

My sense is that you can approach a situation like this in one of two ways:

1) You can search the archives for an example in which the other side did something questionable and then say, “Oh well, politics as usual!”

or

2) You can condemn the criminal actions of Democrats and Republicans for what they (equally) are: criminal actions.

The latter seems a bit more ethical.

The Inspector General’s report on political hiring at the Department of Justice was released yesterday. And yes it does seem to show that the Bush administration went to lengths to hire more conservative young lawyers into the Honors track.

And what on earth might have prompted them to do such a thing?

From page 16:

Christopher Wray, then Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, said that politics and ideology only arose in the context of the concern of trying to be more inclusive. He said there was a perception that in past administrations the career employees doing the screening may have weeded out candidates because the selecting officials were not “comfortable with their political persuasion.” He said the political persuasion he was referring to pertained to candidates who had been in the military or law enforcement, “whether you call that conservative or not.”

Is there evidence to support this “perception”? Why yes!

On pp. 20-21, we find the numbers that establish that the DoJ career staff in 2002 nominated twice as many identifiable liberals as identifiable conservatives for the Honors track program: 100 vs. 46.

And on page 27, we read that the DoJ bureaucracy advanced nearly three times as many identifiable liberals as conservatives for summer internships that year, 81 vs. 29.

If anything, the ideological bias of the DoJ bureaucracy seems to have become more entrenched with time. In 2006, it nominated five times as many liberals as conservatives for Honors track positions, 150 v. 28, and more three times as many liberals as conservatives for summer internships, 68 v. 16. (See p. 41 and p. 54.)

The evidence suggests that DoJ hiring was contaminated by ideology long before the Bush administration came to town. The Bush administration may have erred and over-corrected. But let’s not allow the permanent government and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) to get away with spreading the claim that things were done in a neutral fashion beforehand.