As expected, Justice Department official Bradley Schlozman has altered testimony he'd given before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 5 regarding the possible use of Department resources to promote partisan political agendas.
At the hearing, Committee members kept asking why Schlozman launched four small-scale cases involving voter-registration fraud (in a Republican battleground state) just days before the November 2006 election--despite written Department policy that urges the opposite. Schlozman kept answering that a lawyer in Justice's Public Integrity section had directed him to do it (see Legal Times' Blog and testimony on CSPAN).
In yesterday's letter to the Committee chairman, Schlozman retracted blame that he'd laid at his fellow lawyer's feet, stating "I take full responsibility for the decision to move forward with the prosecutions" (Legal Times has a pdf the letter).
Further, Schlozman claimed that Justice's written policy (urging that election fraud cases not be prosecuted just before an election) did not apply to his pre-election cases, because the policy targets election fraud, while Schlozman's cases targeted voter-registration fraud.
I doubt we've heard the end of this issue.
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