Schlozman Leaves Justice Department
By Paul Kiel - August 20, 2007, 5:02 PM
Bradley Schlozman, a former Justice Department official who was at the center of the U.S. attorneys scandal and is under investigation by the Departments inspector general for his alleged efforts to politicize the Civil Rights Division, has finally left his post at the Department.
After he left his position as the U.S. attorney in Kansas City this April, Schlozman moved to the Justice Department office that oversees all U.S. attorneys. Reached on his cell phone today, Schlozman confirmed that he'd left the Department last week, but refused to say anything more and then hung up.
That makes Schlozman the latest in a long line of Department officials to leave in the wake of the firings scandal, including former White House liaison Monica Goodling, chief of staff Kyle Sampson, Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, and his chief of staff Michael Elston.
Before being tapped as the U.S. attorney for Kansas City in March of 2006 (after his predecessor Todd Graves was abruptly fired), Schlozman oversaw the voting rights section of the Civil Rights Division with an iron hand. Former employees say that, in tandem with Hans von Spakovsky, Schlozman gutted the voting rights division's efforts to protect African-American voters and made sure that the group did not oppose voter ID laws. The two also punished lawyers and other employees who did not toe the line, former employees say, sometimes changing performance evaluations to add negative comments.
Schlozman has further been accused of politicizing the hiring at the Civil Rights Division, famously commenting that he was replacing Democratic hires with "good Americans." It's this activity which the Department's joint internal investigation, led by the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility, is probing.
After he was appointed as a U.S. attorney in the spring of 2006, Schlozman pursued indictments against four voter registration workers for ACORN just days before the 2006 election, a move which became more controversial in the context of the firings scandal. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Schlozman claimed that he'd brought the indictments "at the direction" of the director of the Election Crimes Branch in the Public Integrity Section. He subsequently revised that testimony to reflect that he himself had pursued the indictments and had gotten approval from the section.
The Justice Department did not respond to our request for comment.
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