WASHINGTON — Two years ago, in a speech at the Justice Department marking the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Bradley J. Schlozman, then the acting chief of the department's civil rights division, found much to celebrate.
"The voting enforcement efforts of the civil rights division during this administration have been as strong, if not stronger, than ever," Schlozman declared. "We have a tremendous record, one that is a testament to the division's outstanding attorneys and staff."
Schlozman, a Bush administration political appointee, was also in the process of dismantling the ranks of career attorneys in the division, former employees contend.
Some of the division's most experienced lawyers resigned or were involuntarily transferred, often in favor of Republican loyalists who had a much different view of the laws they were sworn to uphold, the former employees allege.
"He viewed me as the enemy. He viewed most career attorneys as the enemy," said Joseph D. Rich, a former chief of the department's voting-rights section. Rich estimates that more than half of the 38 attorneys in the section eventually left.
Two months before Schlozman's speech, Rich resigned from the department, citing run-ins with Schlozman and other Bush appointees. Rich had served for 36 years.
On Tuesday, Schlozman is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill in connection with the congressional investigation into the firings of U.S. attorneys last year.
Democrats are investigating whether the prosecutors were fired for improper reasons. One line of inquiry is whether the administration targeted those who were not aggressively pursuing voting-rights cases that could have benefited Republicans in so-called battleground states.
Schlozman was an architect of administration voting-rights policy at the Justice Department as well as an interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., where he filed a number of controversial voting-rights suits.
Schlozman, who now works in the Justice Department office that oversees U.S. attorneys, was not available for comment.
His testimony comes as investigators at Justice have expanded an internal investigation into the U.S. attorney scandal to include allegations of discriminatory hiring, including at the civil rights division.
Last month, Monica M. Goodling, a former top aide to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, admitted in sworn testimony before Congress that she may have violated federal civil-service laws by considering the partisan political activities of applicants for career Justice Department positions.
