Read the whole story at http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003311.php
How Immigration Judge Spots Went Political — and Went Back
By Paul Kiel – May 29, 2007, 6:10 PM
Last week, Monica Goodling revealed that she’d routinely placed Republicans in civil service spots, including immigration judge positions. As she was eventually forced to concede under hard questioning, doing that was against the law.
But it also became apparent that the practice was nothing new — and that it dated at least back to 2004, before Goodling got involved. That’s how people like Garry Malphrus, a former Brooks Brother rioter with no immigration experience, became a judge.
AVALON FARMBLOG 
more from thinkprogress.org
Politicization of immigration judges exposed.
ThinkProgress noted last week that the Justice Department has expanded its internal investigation of partisan hiring practices after Monica Goodling admitted that she “considered party affiliation in screening applicants to become immigration judges.” The Legal Times sheds new light on this controversial process:
Historically, those hired for the positions were vetted by the Executive Office of Immigration Review and its recommendations were forwarded to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General — where they were almost uniformly approved. Sometimes this process took place without public advertisements for the posts and without competing candidates. But in recent years, that process came to be inverted: instead the attorney general’s office exercised “direct-hire” authority in selecting a candidate who was then sent to EOIR. Rarely, if ever, did EOIR object to a candidate — even if the person lacked any background in immigration law. […]
The effort picked up speed under Gonzales’ tenure, when Goodling took over Sampson’s hiring responsibilities. If Sampson or Goodling had a suggestion, [EOIR] didn’t look for any other candidates. “In the past year, we were just asked to give the city and then we would get a name or two,” Rooney says.
Members of the immigration judiciary noticed the shift. “A lot of my colleagues in [the immigration] bar seemed to have applications pending for years without ever being interviewed while people with contacts at the White House were being appointed at warp speed,” says Bruce Einhorn, who retired as an immigration judge in Los Angeles in January.
This hiring process has since been ended, following a lawsuit by a Hispanic immigration lawyer who charged that the Justice Dept. “discriminated against her on the basis of her race and gender when it chose two white men for the vacancy.” But the legacy of Gonzales lives on.
Daily Kos reporting…
Found: Rove’s Playbook for Attorney Scandal
by Deep Harm
Wed Jun 06, 2007 at 03:24:34 PM PDT
In the U.S. attorneys scandal, all eyes are on Karl Rove as the presumed architect. But, long before Karl Rove began plying his trade, Fred Malek wrote the manual for politicizing the Justice Department. Malek, a little known but influential Republican operative and “hatchet man,” devised the strategies used to remove Democrats and whistleblowers from the civil service and to turn the federal government into a Republican Party headquarters. Malek’s connections with President Bush may explain why the U.S. Attorney’s office discontinued investigation of wrongdoing at Fannie Mae, where Malek was then a board member and was one of several individuals named in a civil suit. Rather than face criminal penalties, Fannie Mae settled with the SEC and OFHEO for a $400 million civil penalty.
read the whole story here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/6/182434/8934