Ex-DOJ Lawyer: Politics in Ashcroft Justice Department Led to Ouster
A former senior lawyer with the Justice Department says political hiring and firing didn’t start with Alberto Gonzales, and she is Exhibit A.
Writing for Legal Times, Jesselyn Radack says she was forced out of her job at the department when it was headed by John Ashcroft. It happened, she says, after she advised prosecutors that the FBI could not question so-called American Taliban John Walker Lindh without his lawyer present. Her e-mail advice was missing from the file, a fact she reported to the inspector general.
Soon afterward ,Radack was told a negative performance evaluation would be placed in her file unless she left the department, so she resigned in 2002. “I was thrown into the Dumpster of career attorneys ousted for political reasons,” Radack writes.
Later, the missing e-mails were leaked to Newsweek, and Radack says she became the target of a “Kafkaesque investigation” by the inspector general. She was referred for criminal prosecution, but no charges were filed. Ethics charges are pending against her in the D.C. Bar, but Maryland dismissed an ethics complaint.
Radack also says she suspects that politics kept her from getting a position with the Office of the Deputy Attorney General in 2001. She was a senior lawyer in the Justice Department when she applied for the job. Her application was forwarded to Kyle Sampson, who was at the time a personnel officer at the White House. She was asked to forward a copy of her voter registration card along with her résumé. She didn’t get the job.
“To be fair, I can’t prove that partisanship lost me the job in the deputy attorney general’s office,” she writes. “But that voter registration card does stick in my memory.”
Sampson later became chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales and was cited in a recent report for considering politics when hiring immigration judges. A 2003 American Lawyer story has more on Radack’s travails.
