Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he was “ultimately responsible” for the politicized hiring system employed for the Justice Department honors program when he was in office, The Blog of Legal Times reported Tuesday.
Gonzales, who was Attorney General from 2005 to 2007, said in court filings in a pending lawsuit on the matter that he was “disappointed that I didn’t do things differently,” according to the blog. A suit was filed in 2008 on behalf of applicants who weren’t accepted to the program because of their ideological or political affiliations.
“Obviously everyone is smarter in hindsight. In hindsight you wish you would do some things differently and … I feel disappointment in myself,” Gonzales said in the court filings, according to The BLT.
DOJ officials searched the Internet to find applicants’ ideological and political leanings, putting their findings in the candidates’ files, internal probes of the honors and summer intern programs concluded. The Privacy Act generally prohibits the government from recording how people exercise their First Amendment rights, unless they authorize it.
