The Bradley Schlozman story is developing so rapidly a guy can't even spend a couple of hours with a client without some new revelation hitting the wire. Now it seems TPMMuckraker's Paul Keil is reporting that:
Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section, says that under Schlozman and Hans von Spakovsky, the two supervisors of the section, he was ordered to make changes to at least seven performance appraisals: "In several instances," Rich told me, he was ordered to include negative remarks about the work of at least five attorneys who had apparently done nothing more than make recommendations with which Schlozman and von Spakovsky disagreed.When you are told to include false negative remarks in the evaluations of your boss's opponents and to delete true negative remarks from the evaluations of your boss's friends, that is called falsifying documents. Mr. Rich just admitted being ordered to violate the law. If Mr. Schlozman hasn't lawyered up by now, maybe he should. I would suggest both Mr. Rich and Hans von Spakovsky do the same.
Rich also said that it also went the other way: "I was also ordered to remove any remarks which noted areas where there could be improvement from the performance appraisals of attorneys who were favored by and had become allies of Mr. Schlozman."
Rich said that it was too strong of a characterization to say that he'd been ordered to "falsify" the evaluations, which would have been a crime. But he was clear that the orders, like so much of what the political appointees in the Justice Department has done, were a major departure from past practice. In his experience (he worked in the division for nearly forty years), Rich said, past political appointees had not inserted themselves into the evaluation process.
I'm sorry, this story is moving faster than the speed of light. Schlozman is in a world of hurt. He is going to be wondering why he didn't hire at least one democratic and three black lawyers during his time at the civil rights division.
