Boatloads Of Bad Apples
by digby
High level interest:
The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating whether a career attorney in the department was dismissed from her job because of rumors that she is a lesbian. The case grew out of a larger inquiry into the firings of U.S. attorneys and politicization at Justice under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales...
Hagen received the highest possible ratings for her work as liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys' committee on Native American issues. Her final job evaluation lists five categories for supervisors to rank her performance. For each category, a neat X fills the box marked, "Outstanding." And at the bottom of the page, under "overall rating level," she also got the top mark: Outstanding.
The form is dated February 1, 2007. Several months before that evaluation, Hagen was told her contract would not be renewed.
Hagen would not comment for this story, but her job evaluation is consistent with what many others have said about her. A dozen former colleagues, inside and outside of the Justice Department, were interviewed for this story. They worked above, below and side by side with Hagen.
Each one raved about her work.
[...]
The official line on Hagen's dismissal was that contracts like hers are a privilege. Rotating new people through the job each year gives more people a chance to serve.
But what happened next seems to undermine that explanation. Internal Justice Department documents obtained by NPR show that soon after Hagen was let go, two people in her office had their contracts renewed for another year.
And Hagen's post remained vacant months after she left.
Guess who was at the bottom of this odd story? That's right, none other than our young Liberty Law School Alum, Monica Goodling:
Justice Department e-mails obtained by NPR show that Gonzales's senior counsel Monica Goodling had a particular interest in Hagen's duties. A few months before Hagen was let go, according to one e-mail, Goodling removed part of Hagen's job portfolio — the part dealing with child exploitation and abuse.
Goodling, who left the Justice Department last year, declined through her lawyer to comment on the matter.
At the height of the scandal over the fired U.S. attorneys, Goodling admitted to making personnel decisions about career Justice Department lawyers based on improper partisan considerations.
"I crossed the line of the civil service rules," Goodling told Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) at a congressional hearing in May 2007.
Goodling's conversation with Scott focused on whether Republican Party loyalty factored into her hiring decisions. But by all accounts, Hagen was a GOP loyalist.
So, what was Goodling's problem with Hagen?
The Justice Department's inspector general is looking into whether Hagen was dismissed after a rumor reached Goodling that Hagen is a lesbian.
As one Republican source put it, "To some people, that's even worse than being a Democrat."
To some people it's worse than being a murderer.
This is another reason why I laugh out loud when I hear people say that congress must pass retroactive immunity or read stories about Michael Mukasey choking up when describing how the government needs to spy on Americans with impunity to keep the country safe. Even suggesting that the administration might have used these powers for political purposes is met with vociferous objection, as if that's so outrageous as to be nearly delusional. Why you might as well be a Hale-Bopp cultist or a believer in the Protocols of the Elders Of Zion.
And yet we know that the Bush Department of Justice was a cesspool of political corruption emanating from the very top. They destroyed the life of a Democratic Governor in Mississippi for partisan gain. They pursued five times as many public corruption charges against Democrats than Republicans in an era of Republican political majority. They ruined the careers of honest prosecutors who refused to indict Democrats on trumped up charges of voter fraud. Evidently, they fired people for being gay as well.
To simply accept that these people skirted FISA only for the righteous purposes of chasing down terrorist operations is absurd. We already know the kinds of thing the Bush justice department did. Why in the world would we not assume they used all the powers at their disposal to spy on political opponents?
Of course they did. We'd have to be complete idiots to think otherwise.
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