Letters Sent by Attorney General Could Cause Legal Trouble

Lawsuit over honors program challenges politicized hiring.

ByABC News
January 13, 2009, 10:34 AM

Jan. 13, 2009— -- They were rejected once. But faced with the revelation that many would-be applicants had been wrongly turned away for political reasons, Attorney General Michael Mukasey invited them to apply again.

Now those invitations -- 167 letters sent to applicants for the department's prestigious Honors Program for 2006 -- could cause the government greater legal heartache as part of a lawsuit stemming from one of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration, the politicization of hiring at the Justice Department.

Click here to see one of the letters.

Plaintiffs argue that top Justice Department officials, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, violated these rejected applicants' rights by taking politics into consideration in the hiring process, a pattern that, at least broadly, was well-documented by the agency's own inspector general (including in Tuesday's report on the civil rights division).

But plaintiffs allege that the Justice Department -- and specifically Mukasey -- have committed a "serious breach of professional responsibility that warrants his immediate attention, internal inquiry, and rectification," by sending out letters in the middle of the litigation.

The Justice Department has moved to dismiss the entire lawsuit, arguing that some of the plaintiffs were not improperly rejected and that they did not follow the proper department protocol for addressing grievances.

The scandal over the Honors Program erupted after the firing of at least eight U.S. attorneys in late 2006. Those firing led to a series of revelations that the Bush-era Justice Department had routinely taken applicants' politics into consideration in hiring for career-level positions, which are supposed to be based on merit alone.

A 2008 report by the department's Inspector General confirmed these activities with respect to the Honors Program, the singular way for top law school graduates to enter the Justice Department, where they get broad exposure and hands-on training in prosecution. It found that under the Bush administrtion, screening for applicants had shifted from the hands of career attorneys to the politically minded officials in the Office of the Attorney General, who routinely threw out applicants who appeared more liberal leaning.

That's why applicants filed suit last summer in an attempt to hold top officials accountable for the hiring scandal that ultimately led to Gonzales' resignation.