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My Badge of Honor: “Deselected” by Bush’s Department of Justice (pdf) by Lewis & Clark Law School alum Jamie Saul.

Background:

On Tuesday, June 24 the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility published their report on the improper use of political and ideological affiliations to reject applications to the DOJ.

The scathing report, An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring in the Department of Justice Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program (pdf, 115 pages), provides numerous examples of the Justice Department illegally weeding out “leftist” candidates for nonpartisan career attorney positions. This New York Times article, Report Assails Political Hiring In Justice Dept. , has a good overview of the findings.

Turn to page 86 of the report (this link should get you there) and you will read of a candidate for the Honors Program from Lewis & Clark Law School. A member of the top 10 percent of his class, he was “deselected” due to his work with the Law School’s Northwest Environment Defense Center, Earthjustice, and his position as articles editor for Environmental Law:

The candidate indicated in his essay a strong interest in working in environmental law, including that he wanted “to serve as part of the team charged with enforcing the world’s most comprehensive environmental laws, and with defending the crucial work of our environmental and resource management agencies.”

Elston commented that while he did not know anything about the organizations that the candidate worked for

the impression I’m left with after a quick look at this is that this is someone who had come to the Environment Division . . . with an agenda, not with an open mind as to the best way to enforce the environment, environmental laws. . . . I had a negative reaction to that. So, I may well have voted with Esther on that one.

Investigation, p. 86 & footnote 55

The candidate, left unnamed in the report, was Jamie Saul, a 2007 graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School. Saul is a Staff Attorney at Midwest Environmental Advocates, a non-profit environmental law center in Wisconsin.

Jamie Saul has written a piece describing his reaction to the report, and to discovering that he was one of the candidates deselected for political reasons:

I have been advised by friends in the legal field to wear this rejection like a badge of honor, and that’s what I intend to do. It’s reassuring to know that my views on environmental protection don’t quite line up with those of this administrations policymakers (that’s an understatement, folks), and now I find myself working at the wonderful Midwest Environmental Advocates in Madison.

BoleyBlogs! appreciates Mr. Saul sharing My Badge of Honor with us. He provides a valuable perspective which, we trust, will shortly also be appearing in local and national newspapers.

Read My Badge of Honor: “Deselected” by Bush’s Department of Justice (pdf) by Jamie Saul.