The fresh-faced, newly-minted JDs who graduated from law school this decade with a hankering for a career at the U.S. Justice Department might have proudly listed some of extracurricular activites — say Greenpeace, the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, or the American Constitution Society — on their resumes without knowing that they were actually screwing themselves out of a job interview. How, exactly?

A very damning report on the attorney-hiring practices at the Justice Department shows that aides used liberal "buzzwords" in applications and resumes to weed out lawyers with Democratic leanings. It's been happening since 2002, but it apparently became markedly worse around 2006 (yay, Alberto Gonzales!).

“Many qualified candidates” were rejected for the department’s honors program because of what was perceived as a liberal bias, the report found. Those practices, the report concluded, “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”

The shift began in 2002, when advisers to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft restructured the honors program in response to what some officials saw as a liberal tilt in recruiting young lawyers from elite law schools like Harvard and Yale. While the recruitment was once controlled largely by career officials in each section who would review applications, political officials in the department began to assume more control, rejecting candidates with liberal or Democratic affiliations “at a significantly higher rate” than those with Republican or conservative credentials, the report said.

The practice has proven to be particularly detrimental to the department's civil rights division, which has developed an obvious "conservative agenda" in deciding what cases to pursue. Yes. Many of us have noticed.

If any Justice Department Honor's program rejects who were perfectly qualified at the time of application are reading this, now you know what happened. The truth is, you probably wouldn't have wanted to work there anyway. [NYT]