By Daniel Schulman
Mother Jones Online

The right-wing lawyers’ group is the casting couch for the federal judiciary-and may have been, newly released documents indicate, for the Justice Department too.

Before midnight on March 7, 2005, Leonard Leo (pictured at left)tapped out an email on his BlackBerry to Mary Beth Buchanan, then the director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, suggesting a candidate to replace Carol Lam, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California. “You guys need a good candidate?” Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, wrote to Buchanan, herself a member of the influential conservative lawyers’ group. “I’d strongly recommend the current GC [general counsel] of the Air Force, Mary Walker.”

At the time, White House and Justice Department officials were in preliminary talks about replacing an unspecified number of “underperforming” federal prosecutors, a plan that would culminate almost two years later in the forced resignations of nine U.S. Attorneys, including Lam, and ignite a scandal that has claimed the jobs of at least four high-ranking Justice Department officials. Leo’s email, written so early in the process, speaks to the close relationship that has developed between the Federalist Society-an organization whose aims include “reordering priorities” within the judicial system to fit its conservative agenda-and key Justice Department decision makers, many of whom are members of the group.

While perhaps not a prerequisite for employment at the highest echelons of Justice, membership in the society has become a standard by which political appointees at the agency identify candidates who share their agenda. Some officials at the agency view it as such an indicator of conservative virtue that membership in the society was included as a category-along with Hill and campaign experience-on a spreadsheet that was used to rank the qualifications of the 93 sitting U.S. Attorneys, a document included in the reams of Justice Department memoranda released by the House Judiciary Committee this spring.

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