John Bresnahan at The Politico reports: Under normal circumstances, the various divisions at Justice review applications from potential hires, set interviews and send the list to the Office of Attorney Recruitment and Management, which gives the green light to proceed.
But recently, a number of divisions' requests to interview certain applicants were turned down, and the career employees started to wonder why. They were told that the interview approval now must be made by the office of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, and "when the list of potential interviewees was returned this year, it was cut dramatically."
These career employees got a meeting with Michael Elston, McNulty's chief of staff and a central figure in the prosecutor purge. This meeting took place on Dec. 5, and it didn't go well. According to the career employees' letter, obtained by The Crypt, Elston "was offensive to the point of (being) insulting."
(…)
"Claiming that the entire group had not 'done their jobs' in reviewing applicants, (Elston) said that he had a 'screening panel' to go over the list and research these candidates on the Internet; he refused to give the names of those on his 'panel,'" the career employees wrote. "Mr. (Elston) said that people were struck from the list for three reasons: grades, spelling errors on applications and inappropriate information about them on the Internet."
So, in their own words, the career employees did some checking of their own. They reportedly detected a "common denominator" for "most of those" struck from the interview list: They had "interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a 'liberal cause' or otherwise appeared to have 'liberal' leanings. Summa cum laude graduates at both Yale and Harvard were rejected for interviews." Via Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker, who observes that Pat Robertson's Regent University grads have no problem getting their foot in the DoJ's door.
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