Fixing the Bureaucracy: Will DOJ Be Obama’s Most Difficult Task?

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The Obama Administration has to rebuild a lot of broken federal agencies: the FDA, the EPA, FEMA, and on and on. But there may be no federal body that has fallen further than the Department of Justice, which has gone from being a trustworthy independent actor to being an appendage of the White House run by nincompoops and right-wing zealots.

If you ask anyone who has worked in the Justice Department (and we have), they’ll tell you that agency’s most famous controversy — the fired US Attorneys scandal — was simply one stage in a long-running effort to politicize the place from top to bottom. Conservatives in, liberals out. And now an internal DOJ report has found new evidence that purge-like conditions were created inside the building by Bush political appointees. This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad:

To Bradley Schlozman, they were “mold spores,” “commies” and “crazy libs.”

He was referring to the career lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil rights and voting rights divisions. From 2003 to 2006, Schlozman was a Bush appointee who supervised them. Along with several others, he came to symbolize the midlevel political appointees who brought a hard-edged ideology to the day-to-day workings of the Justice Department.

“My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section,” he said in an e-mail in 2003. “I too get to work with mold spores, but here in Civil Rights, we call them Voting Section attorneys,” he confided to another friend.

He hoped to get rid of the “Democrats” and “liberals” because they were “disloyal” and replace them with “real Americans” and “right-thinking Americans.”

He appears to have succeeded by his standards, according to an inspector general’s report released Tuesday. Among the newly hired lawyers whose political or ideological views could be discerned, 63 of 65 lawyers hired under Schlozman had Republican or conservative credentials, the report said….

Joseph D. Rich, the former chief of the voting rights section at the Department of Justice, called Schlozman “probably the most miserable person I ever worked for.” Rich had worked for the DOJ for 37 years and under seven presidents. But the situation at DOJ is not really about Schlozman, who has already moved on to private practice. It’s about those 63 lawyers who were presumably hired because they shared Schlozman’s political agenda. They’ll be in the system for years. How do you balance them out or mitigate their impact without initiating a similarly slanted hiring drive that brings on nothing but liberals? That may be one of Barack Obama’s most difficult tasks as he attempts to recreate a functioning federal bureaucracy.

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Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

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“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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