In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.

Paralleling concerns of many conservative groups, the Justice Department has successfully argued in a number of cases that government agencies, employers or private organizations have improperly suppressed religious expression in situations that the Constitution’s drafters did not mean to restrict.

The shift at the Justice Department has significantly altered the government’s civil rights mission, said Brian K. Landsberg, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and a former Justice Department lawyer under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Not until recently has anyone in the department considered religious discrimination such a high priority,” Professor Landsberg said. “No one had ever considered it to be of the same magnitude as race or national origin.”

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:
Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

Along with its changed civil rights mission, the department has also tried to overhaul the roster of government lawyers who deal with civil rights. The agency has transferred or demoted some experienced civil rights litigators while bringing in lawyers, including graduates of religious-affiliated law schools and some people vocal about their faith, who favor the new priorities. That has created some unease, with some career lawyers disdainfully referring to the newcomers as “holy hires.”

[Former Civil Rights Prosecutor Rigel] Oliveri recalled that when she was hired in 2000 by the Justice Department, she was impressed by the accomplishments of her peers. But once the political appointees controlled the hiring, she said, “The change in the quality of people who were chosen was very pronounced.”
When the front office sent around the résumés of those newly hired for the honors program, she said, “It was obvious what they had: conservative and religious bona fides.”

[Cynthia] Magnuson, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said it was justified in devoting so much attention to the issue because Congress has demonstrated its interest by including religion in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enacting the 2000 law involving zoning restrictions, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

Ms. Magnuson also said the department had not diminished its interest in enforcing racial and national origin discrimination cases. The changes at the Justice Department began under Attorney General John Ashcroft, but have accelerated under Alberto R. Gonzales, his successor.

Mr. Gonzales has increasingly cited his agency’s record on behalf of religious causes as among his most important accomplishments, often noting the successful intervention in cases on behalf of people who had suffered discrimination for wearing Muslim head coverings. In speeches, he routinely says that religious freedom is the nation’s “first freedom because our founders saw fit to place it first in the Bill of Rights.”

At the same time, the department has sharply reduced its efforts to combat voting rights plans that may dilute black electoral strength.
[..]
Joseph D. Rich, who recently stepped down as head of the voting rights section after a 37-year career at Justice, said that only the federal government had the resources to bring voting dilution cases, while private groups have been able to bring the language cases. The civil rights division also brought the first case ever on behalf of white voters, alleging in 2005 that a black political leader in Noxubee County, Miss., was intimidating whites at the polls.

The shift in priorities at the criminal section of the civil rights division has been especially stark. The criminal section — which previously had mostly focused on hate crimes or lawsuits against police officers who may have violated someone’s civil rights — began taking on human trafficking cases that had previously been handled elsewhere.
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Pursuing trafficking cases, rather than those involving hate crimes or police abuse, was seen as important to moving ahead in the department, current and former career officials said. They added that political appointees in supervisory positions frequently vetoed proposed hate crime investigations or questioned them to death.

“You only needed for that to happen a few times and people got the message they shouldn’t be eager to send up such cases,” said one lawyer who would talk only on condition of anonymity.

As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.

In meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.

“There’s an assumption that often passes for common sense that the more pain imposed on someone, the more likely they are to comply,” said Randy Borum, a psychologist at the University of South Florida who, like several of the study’s contributors, is a consultant for the Defense Department.
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[S]ome of the experts involved in the interrogation review, called “Educing Information,” say that during World War II, German and Japanese prisoners were effectively questioned without coercion.

“It far outclassed what we’ve done,” said Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort Hunt, Va., “had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,” and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for the December report.

Mr. Kleinman, who worked as an interrogator in Iraq in 2003, called the post-Sept. 11 efforts “amateurish” by comparison to the World War II program, with inexperienced interrogators who worked through interpreters and had little familiarity with the prisoners’ culture.

Robert F. Coulam, a research professor and attorney at Simmons College and a study participant, said that the government’s most vigorous work on interrogation to date has been in seeking legal justifications for harsh tactics. Even today, he said, “there’s nothing like the mobilization of effort and political energy that was put into relaxing the rules” governing interrogation.

In an April lecture, Philip D. Zelikow, the former adviser to Ms. Rice, said it was a grave mistake to delegate to attorneys decisions on the moral question of how prisoners should be treated.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he refused to recertify the [warrantless wiretapping] program because Attorney General John Ashcroft had reservations about its legality just before falling ill with pancreatitis in March 2004.

The White House, Comey said, recertified the program without the Justice Department's signoff, allowing it to operate for about three weeks without concurrence on whether it was legal. Comey, Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials at one point considered resigning, Comey said.

"I couldn't stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," Comey told the panel.

The dramatic hospital confrontation involved Comey, the acting attorney general during Ashcroft's absence, and a White House team that included Bush's then-counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Comey said. Gonzales later succeeded Ashcroft as attorney general.

Senior government officials had expressed concerns about whether the National Security Agency, which administered the warrantless eavesdropping program, had the proper oversight in place. Other concerns included whether any president possessed the legal and constitutional authority to authorize the program as it operated at the time.

Comey testified Tuesday that when he refused to certify the program, Gonzales and Card headed to Ashcroft's sick bed in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital.

When Gonzales appealed to Ashcroft, the ailing attorney general lifted his head off the pillow and in straightforward terms described his views of the program, Comey said. Then he pointed out that Comey, not Ashcroft, held the powers of the attorney general at that moment.

Gonzales and Card then left the hospital room, Comey said.

Resigned Justice Department deputy Paul McNulty occupied "a very central place" at the agency, according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. At the National Press Club, Gonzales said it was McNulty's suggestions on which U.S. attorneys to dismiss that mattered most to him.
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"The one person that I would care about would be the views of the deputy attorney general, because the deputy attorney general is the direct supervisor of the United States attorneys," Gonzales said.

"And in this particular case, Mr. McNulty was a former colleague of all of these United States attorneys, and so he would probably know better than anyone else about the performance and the qualifications of these — of our United States attorney community."

McNulty has acknowledged approving, last October, the list of prosecutors who were ordered to leave. But documents released by the Justice Department show he was not closely involved in picking all the U.S. attorneys who were put on the list — a job mostly driven by two Gonzales staffers with little prosecutorial experience.

Federal judges Thursday ruled that former state purchasing supervisor Georgia L. Thompson was wrongly convicted of making sure a state travel contract went to a firm linked to Gov. Jim Doyle's re-election campaign and freed her from an Illinois prison.

The three-judge panel in Chicago acted with unusual speed, ruling after oral arguments by Thompson's attorney and the U.S. attorney's office.

During 26 minutes of oral arguments, all three judges assailed the government's case, with Judge Diane Wood saying at one point that "the evidence is beyond thin."

During a news conference later Thursday, Doyle, a former state attorney general, said the three judges did an "extraordinary thing" by entering an order finding Thompson innocent and ordering her immediate release.

Decisions at that level of the federal judicial system usually take weeks or months after oral arguments.

To charge her, Mr. Biskupic had to look past a mountain of evidence of innocence. Ms. Thompson was not a Doyle partisan. She was a civil servant, hired by a Republican governor, with no identifiable interest in politics. She was only one member of a seven-person committee that evaluated the bidders. She was not even aware of the Adelman campaign contributions. She also had a good explanation for her choice: of the 10 travel agencies that competed, Adelman submitted the lowest-cost bid.

While Ms. Thompson did her job conscientiously, that is less clear of Mr. Biskupic. The decision to award the contract — the supposed crime — occurred in Madison, in the jurisdiction of Wisconsin’s other United States attorney. But for reasons that are hard to understand, the Milwaukee-based Mr. Biskupic swept in and took the case.

While he was investigating, in the fall of 2005, Mr. Biskupic informed the media. Justice Department guidelines say federal prosecutors can publicly discuss investigations before an indictment only under extraordinary circumstances. This case hardly met that test.

The prosecution proceeded on a schedule that worked out perfectly for the Republican candidate for governor. Mr. Biskupic announced Ms. Thompson’s indictment in January 2006. She went to trial that summer, and was sentenced in late September, weeks before the election.

Most of the eight dismissed prosecutors came from swing states, and Democrats suspect they may have been purged to make room for prosecutors who would help Republicans win close elections. If so, it might also mean that United States attorneys in all swing states were under unusual pressure.

Wisconsin may be the closest swing state of all. President Bush lost it in 2004 by about 12,000 votes, and in 2000, by about half that. According to some Wisconsin politicians, Karl Rove said that their state was his highest priority among governor’s races in 2006, because he believed a Republican governor could help the party win Wisconsin in the 2008 presidential election.

Of the 1,000 White House officials with political duties, 22 — including Karl Rove, the chief political strategist — have Republican National Committee accounts that are supposed to be used only for campaign-related work. But recent revelations that some officials have used those accounts for Bush administration business, including discussions of a plan to dismiss United States attorneys, has prompted a Congressional investigation.

On Wednesday, Scott Stanzel, deputy White House press secretary, said the administration had recently begun its own inquiry, and had concluded that its policy governing political e-mail accounts was unclear, that the White House was not aggressive enough in monitoring political e-mail and that some people who had the accounts did not follow the policy closely enough.

As a result, Mr. Stanzel said, “some official e-mails have potentially been lost.” He said Mr. Bush had told the White House counsel’s office “to do everything practical to retrieve potentially lost messages.”

The flap grows out of the investigation into the dismissals of the prosecutors. E-mail messages provided to Congress in that inquiry showed that Scott Jennings, a deputy political director for Mr. Bush, used his national committee address, ending in gwb43.com, to discuss them with aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, including D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned amid the ensuing uproar.

In January, an assistant to Mr. Jennings used a gwb43.com account to circulate a document discussing Democrats who are being singled out for defeat in 2008. “Please do not e-mail this out or let people see it,” the e-mail read, adding, “It is a close hold, and we’re not supposed to be e-mailing it around.”

Other messages have brought scrutiny as well, including exchanges between Susan Ralston, a former assistant to Mr. Rove, and Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist convicted of corruption charges.

At issue is how the White House complies with two seemingly competing laws. One is the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which requires the administration to ensure that its decisions and deliberations are “adequately documented” and that records flowing out of those decisions are preserved.

The other is the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in political business on government time.

Bush said Tuesday he worried that allowing testimony under oath would set a precedent on the separation of powers that would harm the presidency as an institution.

"Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.”

"One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public's faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold the rule of law.''

“If Karl Rove plans to tell the truth, he has nothing to fear from being under oath like any other witness."

“I’m sorry this, frankly, has bubbled to the surface the way it has, for the U.S. attorneys involved. I really am. These are — I put them in there in the first place; they’re decent people. They serve at our pleasure. And yet, now they’re being held up into the scrutiny of all this, and it’s just — what I said in my comments, I meant about them. I appreciated their service, and I’m sorry that the situation has gotten to where it’s got. But that’s Washington, D.C. for you. You know, there’s a lot of politics in this town.”