New report sheds light on firing of U.S. attorney from Michigan

Bush official engaged in illegal discrimination

A new report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General’s office implicates former DOJ official Monica Goodling in illegal employment decisions, including one involving a former U.S. attorney from Michigan.

The report, the result of a joint investigation of the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and the Office of the Inspector General, is in some ways old news. Goodling, the former White House liaison to the DOJ and senior counsel to the attorney general, was in charge of the Bush administration’s hiring for the Justice Department and had already admitted, under a grant of immunity, to violating the law by basing hiring and firing decisions of career attorneys on political considerations. But there is a fair amount of material in the report that confirms what was previously only suspected. Most of the report focused on Goodling’s consideration of an applicant’s political views when hiring for a career position, but one part of the report concluded that she also discriminated against a pair of U.S. attorneys in Michigan based on their alleged homosexuality.

There are two types of positions in the federal bureaucracy, political appointees and career positions. While political appointees generally change as the party in the White House changes, career appointments do not. Political appointees are almost always chosen based on party affiliation, but it is illegal under federal law to base employment decisions for career positions on such political considerations. Goodling was forbidden by law from giving career positions only to Republicans, for instance. Interestingly, despite having admitted to a congressional committee that she broke the law, Goodling refused to be interviewed during the DOJ’s own investigation.

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Chapter 7 of the report examines allegations that Goodling discriminated against a U.S. attorney based on rumors that she was a lesbian. Though the report does not identify the victim, it is in fact Margaret Chiara, the former U.S. attorney for the western district of Michigan based in Grand Rapids. Chiara was nominated to be a U.S. attorney by President Bush shortly after he took office in 2001, having previously been elected the Cass County prosecutor as a Republican. She was forced to resign in March 2007.

The purported reason why Chiara was forced out was never clear. The Bush administration claimed it was due to poor performance, but Chiara said at the time that she was told that she was being pushed aside to clear a position for “an individual they wanted to advance.” The chief judge for the western district of Michigan, Robert Holmes Bell, publicly disputed the accusations of poor performance, calling Chiara one of the finest U.S. attorneys he had worked with in his two decades on the federal bench.

This report examines the situation of both Chiara and Leslie Hagen, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Grand Rapids office. Goodling believed, based solely upon rumors denied by both Chiara and Hagen, that the two women were involved in a lesbian relationship. When Hagen was detailed to the executive office of the United States Attorneys (EOUSA), she received exemplary performance reviews. The report notes:

In fact, [Hagen's] 2006 performance appraisal, which covered her detail at EOUSA, rated her performance as