Progress Illinois

In an unusual and encouraging development, a federal grand jury today subpoenaed several former senior Justice Department attorneys as part of an investigation into the work of Bradley Schlozman, who was instrumental in politicizing the agency's Civil Rights Division while serving as its head. He later investigated phantom "voting fraud" cases for partisan ends while an interim U.S. attorney in neighboring Missouri. Over at Huffington Post, Murray Waas has more:

The extraordinary step by the Justice Department of subpoenaing attorneys once from within its own ranks was taken because several of them refused to voluntarily give interviews to the Department Inspector General, which has been conducting its own probe of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division, the same sources said.

The grand jury has been investigating allegations that a former senior Bush administration appointee in the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman, gave false or misleading testimony on a variety of topics to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sources close to the investigation say that the grand jury is also more broadly examining whether Schlozman and other Department officials violated civil service laws by screening Civil Rights attorneys for political affiliation while hiring them.

The details are still coming in, but Waas' sources have identified Hans von Spakovsky as one of the attorneys who received a subpeona. Spakovsky served as a former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and was at one time Schlozman's top aide. Ostensibly hired to block the implementation of voting laws that infrigned on the rights of minority, the two stooges actually worked to preserve restrictive voter ID laws. Classy.

It was this record that led Barack Obama to successfully block President Bush's nomination of Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission.

For more on the DOJ's downfall, check out this post from late-June.