Liberal Interns Rejected by Justice Department’s Hiring Officials

Digg

StumbleUpon

Delicious

Liberal Interns Rejected by Justice Department’s Hiring Officials

Justice Department building in Washington, D.C.

An internal Justice Department investigation found that two of its employees screened out law student job applicants based on their liberal affiliations.

CONSERVATIVE BIAS: An internal report revealed that two Justice Department officials rejected law students who applied for internships based on their politics. By choosing less qualified "conservative" candidates over more qualified "liberal" applicants, they violated anti-discrimination and hiring laws.

by Thea Deley
Informify Staff Writer
June 26, 2008

The Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine and the federal Office of Professional Responsibility investigated the hiring bias. They found the two Justice officials used political and ideological information about internship applicants to screen out "leftist" candidates for two of the departments prestigious internship programs. Students selected often go on to become career attorneys for the government.

Elston and McDonald Screen Out Leftist Law Students

The Justice Department report said the following two people screened out qualified candidates based on their political affiliations:

Michael Elston—chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty
Esther McDonald—department lawyer

In November 2006, McDonald sent an email to colleagues complaining about "leftist commentary and buzzwords" in the candidate applications. Before the internal investigation began, however, most of the email correspondence and other documents about the hiring process were destroyed.

Elston supervised McDonald. He also reviewed applicants and weeded them out based on his own reasons. In 2006, Elston was investigated for his potential role in firing nine liberal U.S. attorneys.

Although Elston and McDonald didn't violate criminal law, they did violate Justice Department policy and federal hiring discrimination law.

Both were appointed by the Bush administration, and both resigned from their posts last year.

Investigators couldn't prove Elston and McDonald intentionally rejected liberal candidates. But, they did find a clear pattern in students selected in 2002 and 2006.

Who Did Justice Department Turn Away and Why?

Elston and McDonald searched the Internet and looked at applicants' resumes to find out their political ideology.

Here are several liberal connections that cost well-qualified law students the coveted internships:

worked as paralegal for Planned Parenthood
worked for Sen. Hillary Clinton
criticized the USA Patriot Act in an opinion article
criticized the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, Jr.
posted cartoon poking fun of President Bush on MySpace
affiliated with environmental group Greenaction
affiliated to the Poverty and Race Research Action Council
wrote a law review article about the military's gender discrimination
earned a clerkship with a Democratic judge

Department investigators also found the following biases:

# Applicants Who Belonged to the Liberal American Constitution Society and were Rejected:	7 out of 7
# Applicants Who Belonged to Conservative Federal Society and were Rejected:	2 out of 29
% of Democratic Applicants Rejected:	70%
% of Republican Applicants Rejected:	10%

During the Justice Department's investigation, it reviewed the rejected "liberal" applicants' school records and backgrounds. Many of them had been better qualified than the candidates hired.

Question for Readers:

Do you think you've ever been turned down for a job based on your political or ideological beliefs?

Many departments within the federal government recruit law students to internship programs in hopes of grooming them as "career lawyers"—people who dedicate their careers to working as government attorneys.

In the past, antitrust, civil rights or other divisions within the Justice Department selected their own law students. Attorney General John Ashcroft changed that in 2002 to compensate for what some saw as a favoring of liberal students from Ivy League law schools.

Ashcroft took away each division's ability to choose its own interns and handed that duty to his political aides.

In an internal report made public Tuesday, Department of Justice investigators found Michael Elston and Esther McDonald had turned away many qualified candidates from two prestigious internship programs:

Attorney General's Honors Program— entry-level attorney positions for law students after they graduate
DOJ Summer Intern Program—competitive and compensated summer internship program

Attorney General Michael Mukasey acknowledged it is unacceptable to use ideology in hiring career lawyers. He said the department has already taken steps to address the bias, and is open to refining its policies further if needed to avoid bias hirings in the future.

The Honors Program at DOJ [Department of Justice] has always been the 'A-list.' The next attorney general will be stuck with many from the B List.