[GOLAGLULT]

It's being reported in alternative media that there is a voter purge issue entangled in the Justice Department ongoing saga of corruption. This is evidently being ignored/hushed in coverage by the corporate news media for a while now.. It involves the Schloz (Bradley Schlozman) and Todd Graves. A google News search revealed only 113 results for "Schlozman Todd Graves". I will try to post more when I find it, but in the meantime
there's this, from an article in the St. Louis Dispatch:

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/new...0?OpenDocument

Political storm brews over testimony
By Philip Dine
POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU
06/06/2007

WASHINGTON — The former U.S. attorney in Kansas City testified Tuesday that he approved indictments against a voter-registration group four days before last year's hotly contested Missouri Senate election because he regarded Justice Department guidelines against such actions as "informal."

Bradley Schlozman, now a high-ranking Justice Department official, said he was not particularly familiar with the part of the Justice Department manual that discouraged such indictments just before elections, but added, "I believe I was probably aware of it."

Schlozman, a Republican, repeatedly told the Senate Judiciary Committee he did not recall conversations or events about various issues. But he firmly denied any wrongdoing, responding to sharp questioning by Democrats. He also said he had no role in the removal of his predecessor, Todd Graves.

At the same time, he defended filing the voter-fraud indictments. "I did not think it was going to influence the election at all," Schlozman said.

Graves had declined to open an investigation into the alleged voter fraud case before he was replaced by Schlozman.

Graves is among the federal prosecutors whose removal last year by the Justice Department has sparked a congressional investigation into whether the process was politicized.

He testified Tuesday that he disapproved of the filing of the vote-fraud case.

"It would have been my understanding that you would not do that," Graves said. "... It surprised me that they'd been filed that close to an election."

He also said, "To this day, I am a committed Republican conservative, but when you put the suit on you leave that aside."

But it was Schlozman's appearance that sparked fireworks. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said that in 30 years on the panel he had never seen a witness so unprepared and unresponsive.

"It seems you are trying to break Attorney General (Alberto) Gonzales' record of saying, 'I don't recall, I don't remember,'" Leahy said.

Several committee members said they thought the vote-fraud case was meant to influence the election, in which then-Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., was trying to ward off a challenge from Claire McCaskill, who won a narrow victory.

Democrats cited a U.S. attorney's office news release about the indictment, which was promptly used by Missouri Republicans to attack McCaskill.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., read from a Nov. 2 news release from the Missouri Republican Party decrying liberal attempts to "steal the election" and referring an assault on the electoral system by a left-wing group with ties to McCaskill.

Asked if that sounded like an attempt to use the suit to influence the election, Schlozman said, "I don't know."

Feingold responded, "I think you know."

Schlozman said he had cleared his action with a public integrity office at the Justice Department, which told him it was all right because the suit didn't involve interviewing any specific voters.

Leahy asked Schlozman to provide relevant e-mail or other documents, pledging he would issue a subpoena for both the documents and Schlozman if the material wasn't supplied voluntarily.

On another matter, Schlozman acknowledged that he may have "boasted" about hiring Republicans and conservatives for nonpolitical positions at the Justice Department, but he maintained he was even-handed in hiring attorneys, asking both conservative and liberal groups for recommendations. When senators named the conservative groups he had consulted and then asked him to name a single liberal group, he was unable to do so.

In his testimony, Graves said he was "immediately angry" when he heard the recent House testimony by former Justice Department official Monica Goodling, which Graves said was an attempt to "turn the blame on someone else" for her own mistakes."

"It was a slur against my name, and I took it very personally," Graves said.

Graves also revealed that he had a major run-in with the Justice Department in 2003, which wanted him to go easier on a man accused of cross-burning in western Missouri. Graves objected. Schlozman was appointed to deal with Graves in that instance.

Justice to appeal

Meanwhile, this week the Department of Justice served notice that it planned to appeal a federal judge's decision in a voter suit brought by the Justice Department against Missouri in 2005.

In April, U.S. District Judge Nanette K. Laughrey ruled the department had not proved violations of the National Voter Registration Act in its suit alleging that Missouri kept improper voter lists.

Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan said in a statement Tuesday that she was "very disappointed that the U.S. Department of Justice seems determined to continue this unnecessary and costly lawsuit." She noted that the judge had found no evidence of voter fraud in Missouri.

[esanamaserrn]

From the Post yesterday:

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 21, 2007; A01

Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department's civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs two years ago -- over the objections of their immediate supervisors -- by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to "make room for some good Americans" in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.

In another politically tinged conversation recounted by former colleagues, Schlozman asked a supervisor if a career lawyer who had voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a onetime political rival of President Bush, could still be trusted.

Schlozman has acknowledged in sworn congressional testimony that he had boasted of hiring Republicans and conservatives, but he denied taking improper actions against the division's career officials. That account was challenged by six officials in the division who said in interviews that they either overhead him making brazen political remarks about career employees or witnessed him making personnel decisions with apparent political motivation.

Schlozman's efforts to hire political conservatives for career jobs throughout the division are now being examined as part of a wide-ranging investigation of the Bush administration's alleged politicization of the Justice Department. The department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility confirmed last month that their inquiry, begun in March, will look at hiring, firing and legal-case decisions in the division.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee plan today to shine a renewed spotlight on decision-making in the division by questioning Schlozman's replacement, Wan Kim, about hiring practices and about its support for state voter-identification programs that could inhibit minority voting.

Democrats also plan to ask about the dwindling diversity of the staff in a division whose core mission includes fighting racial discrimination. The Bush administration, largely under Schlozman, hired seven members as replacements or additions to the 14-lawyer appellate section where Stevens, Calderon and Kwong worked. They included six whites, one Asian and no African Americans.

Schlozman's attorney, William Jordan, said his client did not want to comment on individual personnel decisions. Jordan said that Schlozman does not recall commenting on lawyers' voting records but at times encouraged cases to be reassigned to lawyers Schlozman considered to be very talented. Dugan declined to comment.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd also declined to respond to the allegations but did say that the appellate section's recent track record "speaks for itself." He cited statistics showing that when the section filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the past six years, it had an 87 percent success rate, compared with 61 percent success in the previous six years.

Schlozman arrived at the Justice Department in 2001 as counsel to then-Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson. A Kansas native and 1996 George Washington University law school graduate, Schlozman had clerked for two federal judges and worked alongside William Bradford Reynolds for two years in the Washington law firm Howrey Simon.

Reynolds, whom Schlozman has cited as a mentor, was a controversial assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Reagan administration. His confirmation for a higher department post was blocked by lawmakers in both parties who accused him of pursuing a radical interpretation of the nation's civil rights laws.

Schlozman's and Reynolds's career paths would end up having much in common.

In May 2003, Schlozman was appointed as a deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, and he quickly became enmeshed in hiring decisions previously made by section chiefs. He subsequently became the principal deputy, and in 2005 he was appointed acting assistant attorney general.

Appellate lawyers said that before Schlozman arrived, the small staff enjoyed a collegial work environment generally free of partisanship. Its lawyers concentrated on framing constitutional arguments for pending judicial decisions on hot-button issues such as voting rights, racial discrimination and religious freedom.

Schlozman made little effort to hide his personal interest in the political leanings of the staff, according to five lawyers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because -- like most of those interviewed for this article -- they still work at the department. He and his aides frequently asked appellate supervisors whether career lawyers handling politically sensitive cases were "on our team," the lawyers said.

Schlozman raised the question of partisan politics bluntly in the fall of 2004, they said, when asking appellate supervisors about the "loyalty" of division lawyer Angela Miller, who had once clerked for David. B. Sentelle, a conservative federal appeals judge. He told Miller's bosses that he learned that she voted for McCain in the 2004 Republican primary and asked, "Can we still trust her?"

He also warned section chief Diana Flynn that he would be keeping an eye on the legal work of another career lawyer who "didn't even vote for Bush," according to colleagues who said they heard Flynn describe the exchange. Miller told several of the colleagues that she considered Schlozman's remarks a form of intimidation, and started looking for another job, the lawyers said.

Schlozman and several deputies also took an unusual interest in the assignment of office responsibility for appellate cases and, according to the lawyers and one of the supervisors, repeatedly ordered Flynn to take cases away from career lawyers with expertise and hand them to recent hires whose résumés listed membership in conservative groups, including the Federalist Society.

Colleagues were especially surprised when Sarah Harrington, who graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and was one of the most highly regarded lawyers in the section, had four cases -- including one concerning religious freedom -- taken away at Schlozman's instruction.

In February 2005, Calderon, Stevens and Harrington were all passed over in favor of a recent Schlozman hire when they applied for a new supervisory job that Schlozman created.

In March, Calderon's cases were reassigned and she was given only deportation cases, as were some of her colleagues, several lawyers said. That spring, Schlozman told a resistant Flynn to transfer Stevens to the disability rights section. According to sources in the office, Schlozman instructed Flynn to tell Stevens that the transfer was related to performance and was her idea.

In June, Flynn told Stevens, who was then seven months pregnant, that she had to leave. According to sources familiar with both women's accounts, Flynn alerted Stevens that "the front office didn't want the transfer attributed to them" but that it was not Flynn's idea. Flynn declined to comment for this article.

That same month, Calderon began a six-month detail on the staff of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of Senate Judiciary Committee and a persistent critic of the Bush administration's judicial policies. Friends said she confided that she did not want to give up her Justice job but said she found being barred from appellate work frustrating.

In November, just before she was to return, sources said, the division's human resources office notified her that she had been permanently transferred out of the appellate section -- effective one month earlier. When she asked why, colleagues said, she was told that the office was so busy that it had to replace her when she was on detail.

In December, as Kwong prepared to return to the office after the birth of her first child, Flynn told her that she had been transferred to a much-lower-profile complaint-resolution section.

"When he said he didn't engage in political hiring, most of us thought that was just laughable," said one lawyer in the section, referring to Schlozman's June 5 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Everything Schlozman did was political. And he said so."

Today, Schlozman is gone from civil rights, but Calderon and Stevens are back in the appellate section, and Kwong will return next month, according to public records.

Stevens, who hired a lawyer and filed an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint after the transfer, reached a confidential settlement with the department after Schlozman left the division and returned to her old job in the fall of 2006. Justice officials agreed that Calderon and Kwong should return as well.

Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Missouri in March 2006. But Congress subsequently started looking into why he was hired without any prosecution experience, and why he brought voter-fraud charges against a liberal voting organization five days before the election in a heated congressional race. Schlozman was reassigned this past March to a job in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

[DiBellaBam]

Missouri attorney a focus in firings
Senate bypassed in appointment of Schlozman
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | May 6, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Todd Graves brought just four misdemeanor voter fraud indictments during his five years as the US attorney for western Missouri -- even though some of his fellow Republicans in the closely divided state wanted stricter oversight of Democratic efforts to sign up new voters.

Then, in March 2006, Graves was replaced by a new US attorney -- one who had no prosecutorial experience and bypassed Senate confirmation. Bradley Schlozman moved aggressively where Graves had not, announcing felony indictments of four workers for a liberal activist group on voter registration fraud charges less than a week before the 2006 election.

Republicans, who had been pushing for restrictive new voting laws, applauded. But critics said Schlozman violated a department policy to wait until after an election to bring voter fraud indictments if the case could affect the outcome, either by becoming a campaign issue or by scaring legitimate voters into staying home.

Schlozman is emerging as a focal point of the investigation into the firing of eight US attorneys last year -- and as a symbol of broader complaints that the Bush administration has misused its stewardship of law enforcement to give Republicans an electoral edge.

No stranger to election law controversy, Schlozman previously spent three years as a political appointee in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, where he supervised the voting rights section.

There, he came into conflict with veteran staff over his decisions to approve a Texas redistricting plan and a Georgia photo-ID voting law, both of which benefited Republicans. He also hired many new career lawyers with strong conservative credentials, in what critics say was an attempt to reduce enforcement of laws designed to eliminate obstacles to voting by minorities.

"Schlozman was reshaping the Civil Rights Division," said Joe Rich , who was chief of the voting rights section until taking a buyout in 2005, in an interview. "Schlozman didn't know anything about voting law. . . . All he knew is he wanted to be sure that the Republicans were going to win."

Schlozman declined to be interviewed. In a statement, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd denied that the timing of the election-eve indictments violated department rules and said politics has played no role in Civil Rights Division hiring decisions.

"Political orientation is not a criterion solicited or considered in the hiring process," Boyd said in an e-mailed response.

But the complaints about Schlozman dovetail with other allegations of political bias at the Justice Department. Last week, the department was forced to acknowledge that a key player in the US attorney firings, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's former White House liaison Monica Goodling , is under internal investigation for allegedly taking party affiliation into account when hiring career assistant US attorneys, contrary to federal law.

Schlozman -- a replacement US attorney with a controversial hiring record of his own -- might be asked to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, at the request of Missouri's new Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill.

A native of Kansas, Schlozman graduated from George Washington University law school in 1996, clerked for three years, and worked as a lawyer for two more. In November 2001 he became an aide in the office of the deputy attorney general.

At the time, the Bush administration was starting to take a greater interest in voting laws because of the photo-finish 2000 election. Control of Congress and the White House was turning on a handful of votes in battleground states -- and thus on issues such as districting maps and turnout rates among party loyalists.

Republicans claimed that ineligible voters were a major problem and pushed for laws to require photo IDs. Democrats said there was no evidence of widespread fraud and that such requirements suppress turnout among legitimate voters who are poor or disabled, and thus less likely to have driver's licenses.

The Justice Department's voting rights section referees disputes over the fairness of state election requirements. Under federal civil rights law, the section must sign off on redistricting maps and new voting laws in Southern states to ensure that changes will not reduce minority voting power.

Schlozman stepped into this fray in May 2003, when he was promoted to deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division. He supervised several sections, including voting rights. In the fall 2005, he was promoted to acting head of the division.

Schlozman and his team soon came into conflict with veteran voting rights specialists. Career staff committees recommended rejecting a Texas redistricting map in 2003 and a Georgia photo ID voting law in 2005, saying they would dilute minority voting power. In both cases, the career veterans were overruled. But courts later said the map and the ID law were illegal.

Bob Kengle , a former deputy voting rights chief who left in 2005, said Schlozman also pushed the section to divert more resources into lawsuits forcing states to purge questionable voters from their rolls. One such lawsuit was against Missouri, where he later became US attorney. A court threw the Missouri lawsuit out this year.

Schlozman also moved to take control of hiring for the voting rights section, taking advantage of a new policy that gave political appointees more control. Under Schlozman, the profile of the career attorneys hired by the section underwent a dramatic transformation.

Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65.

Critics said candidates were being hired more for their political views than legal credentials. David Becker , a former voting rights division trial attorney, said that Schlozman's hiring of politically driven conservatives to protect minority voting rights created a "wolf guarding the henhouse situation."

Asked to respond on behalf of Schlozman, the Justice Department said it considers job applicants with a wide variety of backgrounds and insisted that politics has played no role in hiring decisions.

After the 2004 election, administration officials quietly began drawing up a list of US attorneys to replace. Considerations included their perceived loyalty to Bush and a desire by White House political adviser Karl Rove to increase voter fraud prosecutions, documents and testimony have shown. Most of the proposed firings were for US attorneys in states with closely divided elections.

Among those later fired was David Iglesias , from the battleground state of New Mexico, where many of his fellow Republicans had demanded more aggressive voter fraud probes. Iglesias has accused his critics of making the "reprehensible" suggestion that law enforcement decisions should be made on political grounds.

Missouri is another closely divided state. According to McClatchy Newspapers, Graves appeared on a January 2006 list of prosecutors who would be given a chance to resign to save face. He abruptly resigned in March 2006. Gonzales quickly installed Schlozman as Grave's replacement, bypassing Senate confirmation under new law that had been slipped into the Patriot Act.

That summer, the liberal activist group ACORN paid workers $8 an hour to sign up new voters in poor neighborhoods around the country. Later, ACORN's Kansas City chapter discovered that several workers filled out registration forms fraudulently instead of finding real people to sign up. ACORN fired the workers and alerted law enforcement.

Schlozman moved fast, so fast that his office got one of the names on the indictments wrong. He announced the indictments of four former ACORN workers on Nov. 1, 2006, warning that "this national investigation is very much ongoing." Missouri Republicans seized on the indictments to blast Democrats in the campaign endgame.

Critics later accused Schlozman of violating the Justice Department's own rules. A 1995 Justice election crime manual says "federal prosecutors . . . should be extremely careful not to conduct overt investigations during the preelection period" to avoid "chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities" and causing "the investigation itself to become a campaign issue."

"In investigating election fraud matters, the Justice Department must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself," the manual states, adding in underlining that "most, if not all, investigation of alleged election crime must await the end of the election to which the allegation relates."

The department said Schlozman's office got permission from headquarters for the election-eve indictments. It added that the department interprets the policy as having an unwritten exception for voter registration fraud, because investigators need not interview voters for such cases.

On Nov. 7, 2006, Missouri voters narrowly elected Democrat McCaskill over the Republican senator, James Talent . The victory proved essential to the Democrats' new one-vote Senate majority.

Last week, McCaskill told NPR that she'd like Schlozman to testify before Congress: "What this all indicates is that more questions need to be asked, and more answers under oath need to be given."

As the controversy over the US attorney firings started building, the Bush administration picked someone else to be western Missouri's US attorney. Unlike with Schlozman, the administration first sent the nominee to the Senate for confirmation.

In April, when his replacement was confirmed, Schlozman got a new job. He now works in the Justice Department office that supervises all 93 US attorneys, where he is handling sentencing matters and cybercrime.

[JesexhiSeeces]

MTG, you may want to wait a little before dumping all this at once.

It is a lot of information and people might be scared to reply!!!!

(Not saying any is wrong. I, for one, didn't read it yet, but was definitely intimidated by the number and length of the posts you provided...)

[U2DnBGFE]

Sorry, I know it's a lot. I've been following this story outside of the main news headlines and I think the corporate media may be forced to give it more light as details come out.