Justice Rising

Have you noticed that Barry's already running the country?

This is important (via Political Animal):

Investigators say a former top Justice Department official made false statements to Congress and violated federal law in overseeing the agency's civil rights division.

The accusations are included in a new report by the Justice Department's Inspector General on Bradley Schlozman, the former acting head of the civil rights division.

The report says Schlozman politicized and mistreated his staff and tried to punish agency employees he believed were too liberal. The report cited an e-mail in which he noted it had been a while since he'd had to "scream with a bloodcurdling cry at some commie."

If Schlozman's work isn't familiar to you, his "leadership" of the civil rights division was almost comically ridiculous.

Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department's civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs [three] years ago -- over the objections of their immediate supervisors -- by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to "make room for some good Americans" in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.

In another politically tinged conversation recounted by former colleagues, Schlozman asked a supervisor if a career lawyer who had voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a onetime political rival of President Bush, could still be trusted.

Here's one of The Schloz's greatest Hits:

TPM Remembers:

"Right-Thinking Americans"
Bradley Schlozman had an acronym for the type of conservative Republicans he wanted to slot into career positions at the Justice Department: "RTAs," or right-thinking Americans.

Late Update: In a similar vein, Schlozman called career attorneys in the Voting Rights Section "mold spores" and in an email wrote, "My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs rights out of the section."