Earlier this week, NPR reported that the Justice Department is investigating whether US Attorney Leslie Hagen was fired last year because of rumors she is gay.
In the fallout from its larger inquiry into the political firings of US attorneys under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the DOJ's inspector general has come across evidence that one of Gonzales's notorious senior counselors -- Monica Goodling, who resigned last year before admitting she "crossed the line" in her dismissal of several US attorneys for political reasons -- opted not to renew Hagen's contract because she had personal problems with her sexual orientation:
Hagen received the highest possible ratings for her work as liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys' committee on Native American issues...But in October 2006, word came down from the attorney general's office that Hagen had to move on. The official line on Hagen's dismissal was that contracts like hers are a privilege. Rotating new people through the job each year gives more people a chance to serve.
But what happened next seems to undermine that explanation. Internal Justice Department documents obtained by NPR show that soon after Hagen was let go, two people in her office had their contracts renewed for another year. And Hagen's post remained vacant months after she left.
The investigation has revealed that Monica Goodling had taken a personal interest in Leslie Hagan's work, and that several months before the dismissal she relieved Hagen's job portfolio of some of its cases. When senior officials in Hagen's office were later told her contract would be ending altogether, they were apparently informed it was because someone in the Department had a problem with her, and that her sexual orientation was possibly the issue.
Inexplicable and unsubstantiated firings were of course standard among US attorneys at that time, but NPR reports that Hagen couldn't have been fired for political reasons because her colleagues say she was "by all accounts" a Republican loyalist. However, NPR's sources report that to some GOP members in the Justice Department, being gay was "worse than being a Democrat."
It is unclear who initiated this inquiry, or whether it will result in justice for Ms. Hagen's abrupt and undeserved firing. In any event, it is mildly comforting to know that even with the scandal surrounding the US attorney firings largely passed, and with Goodling and Gonzales long gone, the Justice Department still finds it pressing to investigate and clean up the wreckage from their egregious misconduct.
(originally posted at The Seminal)