DOJ Lawyers Lawyer Up

Frankly, it scares the shit out of me to know that our Justice Department is filled with lawyers who don't even know when they're breaking the law.

The Justice Department released an internal memo today to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees telling us basically what we've known since spring last year. That Republican operatives (gasp) hired people based on their loyalty to conservative issues and George W. Bush.

Kyle Sampson, through his lawyer, considers to this day his highly partisan hiring practices "an honest mistake." Considering that refusing to hire people for career positions at the Department of Justice because of political considerations is breaking a basic law that you would think every lawyer would know, especially one already working at the DOJ, it kind of makes one wonder what other clowns got in and what Republican credentials they had to show.

Goodling's shyster, John Dowd, bristled at the thought that his client lied to Congress by saying,

"Far from attempting to conceal information, Ms. Goodling went to great lengths to provide the Congress with relevant facts, including important information about matters that had not yet come to the public's attention."

So explain to us why she'd never admitted this information when she testified May of last year in her 5th amendment-laden non-testimony?

Here's a short list of the people Goodling refused to give "the keys to the Kingdom" of Bushworld: A man who was suspected of being "a liberal Democrat", a man with antiterrorism experience whose wife's political affiliations were suspect and even a woman just suspected of being a lesbian, which is also a clearcut case of a civil rights infraction. Then, April of this year, Goodling was accused of engineering the ouster of a highly qualified attorney for the same reason, despite the lady's extremely high performance reviews.

This brazen and frankly fascist attempt to achieve political purity at the Department of Justice is frighteningly reminiscent of Nazi Germany's attempt to keep the Homeland purely Aryan by purging their nation of Jews and homosexuals. One wonders if Goodling and Sampson marked the files of unwelcome applicants with pink triangles.

So, Bush's goon squad essentially weakened our efforts in the war on terror, set gay and lesbian civil rights back about a half a century and blatantly broke the law and expect mercy because they apologized for it afterwards and, despite how they made their living, claimed ignorance of the law.

WH mouthpiece Tony Fratto sniffed at the DOJ memo and said, "There really is not a lot new here."

Unfortunately, he's right, since this blatant partisanship that stretches from the Department of Justice all the way to Iraq is just business as usual in the kingdom of the ideologically blind.