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WASHINGTON

The former officer, Bradley Schlozman, who helped lead the Civil Rights Division for about three years beginning in 2003, also gave false statements to Congress when he denied factoring politics into hiring decisions, according to the report from the overseer general and Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department.

But federal prosecutors continue week declined to bring criminal charges over against Schlozman, who left the department in 2007 amid an uproar over accusations of widespread politicization.

In the Civil Rights Division, regarded as a cornerstone of the Justice Department from that time the days of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the investigation found that political supervisors charged with enforcing founded on bias laws had illegally discriminated against piece of work applicants perceived to be too liberal. The report said Schlozman’s superiors had ignored warnings about his brash management style and his political agenda.

A lawyer for Schlozman, William Jordan, called the discharge “inexact, incomplete, biased, unsupported by the law and repugnant to the facts,” and said “the so-called investigation was a Star Chamber-type inquiry from the start.”

The investigation grew out of the lawsuit in 2007 over the dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys, including Seattle’s John McKay, which led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and spurred accusations that the White House had allowed political science of ideas to trump law-enforcement decisions.

The report goes beyond the conclusions of three previous internal Justice Department inquiries in exposing the depths of civic interference through personnel decisions. The conclusions of the latest query, the first to focus on the Civil Rights Division, are likely to figure in the Senate hearing Thursday for Eric Holder’s substantiation as attorney general officer.

The report makes its case against Schlozman in his words, drawn from e-mail and voice-mail messages to colleagues and underlings, as he talked about reshaping the political makeup of the Civil Rights Division and doing at a distance through “pinko” and “crazy lib” lawyers and others he did not heed “real Americans.”

In one e-mail regarding a pool of job applicants, he wrote that “as spun completely as I’m here, adherents of Mao’s Little Red Book need not apply.”

When a colleague reported that he had been given an office next to a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal-affairs group, Schlozman responded in an e-mail: “Just between you and me, we hired any other member of ‘the team’ yesterday. And notwithstanding another ideological boon companion will be starting in one month. So we are making development.”

The report found that Schlozman had selected conservative lawyers for primordial assignments and transferred three lawyers out of the Civil Rights Division inasmuch as they were seen as liberals opposed to his politic agenda. All three later brought federal discrimination claims and returned to the division after Schlozman left. The transfers, the report said, violated federal civil-service law and “constituted misconduct.”

The investigation lay the foundation of that, among people hired by Schlozman, 63 of 65 were considered Republican or conservatory, yet that when he was not involved, “the results were more balanced,” with conservatives and liberals split touching evenly.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008625522_justice14.html?syndication=rss