The Ridiculous LexisNexis Search that the Justice Department Used

jamie writes "The politicization of Bush's Justice Department, which this week was officially determined to be illegal, has a funny side too. Sometime in 2005-2006, White House Liaison Jan Williams attended a seminar on LexisNexis searches, and wrote one herself. When she left, she passed it on to her successor Monica Goodling in an email. Justin Mason, author of SpamAssassin, is skeptical about its accuracy:

[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

Needless to say, when asked about it, Williams first said she didn't remember ever seeing it, then said she'd used an edited version just once. LexisNexis records show she used it, as shown, 25 times." Note that 'sex!' appears twice in the query. Must be VERY important.

spotted owl?

what the hell

Re:spotted owl?

Spotted Owl Party members are among the most dangerous people to have in the DOJ. If allowed into the DOJ, they will do everything in their power to preserve the environment and wellbeing of this bird, no matter what the financial or human cost.

Re:spotted owl?

George Bush criticiz nafta for spotted owl gay sex with firearms

Re:spotted owl?

Can't be too careful. What if there was an article in the Times about Iran using aborted, homosexual, spotted owls to smuggle WMD in a plot to cover up Enron? You'd look silly if you weren't "in the know"

Re:spotted owl?

It's a hippy litmus test. The Owl thing was something they used to pin on Gore, so if someone shows up in a newspaper article, with a mention of a "spotted owl" then there is some hippy crap going down.

Or, of course, the person could be using the term themselves to paint someone else as a hippy.

Re:spotted owl?

Not really surprising. Spotted owls are notoriously poor prosecutors. They also have a well-known bias against rats and other vermin, making them unsuitable for political work.

Oblig. Life of Brian

"Sex, sex, sex, that's all they think about!"

Re:Oblig. Life of Brian

"Sex, sex, sex, that's all they think about!"

Well, in fairness, "arrest" and "intox" also appear twice... So they also care about getting drunk and enjoying a bit of the ol' ultraviolence...

TFS Blows, TFA Is About Hiring Practices

For those of you wondering what that query is about and what it's being used for, here's TFA:

Via b1ff.org, here's the Nexis search that US Department of Justice White House liaisons ran on job candidates to determine their political leanings:[Emphasis mine]

So there you go. The Justice Department was using a screwy LexisNexis query to try to determine the political leanings and affiliations of people they were looking to hire, because they were illegally filtering out applications people (non-repubs/conservatives) based on their political affiliations.

You really should drink more coffee in the morning before you start posting, Taco.

Re:TFS Blows, TFA Is About Hiring Practices

Dropping Monica Goodling into that query returns 653 results in the last 2 years.

Re:TFS Blows, TFA Is About Hiring Practices

illegally filtering out applications people (non-repubs/conservatives) based on their political affiliations.

Reading some other articles about this, it appears that was not the full extent. They were even excluding Republicans and conservatives that weren't Republican or conservative enough for them. Basically people that they thought would not make loyal "Bushies".

It also appears that experience was not as highly evaluated as political considerations. One cited example of the was a well regarded senior prosecutor with counterterrorism experience was passed over for a junior attorney with no experience for a counterterrorism post just because the senior prosecutor's wife was a Democrat.

For the uninitiated like myself...

Wikipedia:

"LexisNexis (sometimes simply called "Lexis" or "Nexis" among users) is a popular searchable archive of content from newspapers, magazines, legal documents and other printed sources. LexisNexis claims to be the "worldâ(TM)s largest collection of public records, unpublished opinions, forms, legal, news, and business information" while offering their products to a wide range of professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting and academic markets."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis [wikipedia.org]

They used Lexis to do a form of background search on people. They used the information from these searches to decide who to hire. The DOJ said the way they did this is federally illegal and also against DOJ policy.

And if you're an actual RTFAer, here you go: http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/goodling072408.pdf [usdoj.gov]

Rules

I found this here [lexisnexis.com]:

Connector Order and Priority

Connectors operate in the following order of priority:

1. OR
2. /n, +n, NOT /n
3. /s
4. /p
5. /seg
6. NOT /seg
7. AND
8. AND NOT

If you use two or more of the same connector, they operate left to right. If the "n" (number) connectors have different numbers, the smallest number is operated on first. You cannot use the /p and /s connectors with a proximity connector (e.g., /n).

Example: bankrupt! /25 discharg! AND student OR college OR education /5 loan is operated on in the following manner:

* Because OR has the highest priority, it operates first and creates a unit of student OR college OR education!.
* /5, the smaller of the /n connectors, ties together the term loan and the previously formed unit of student OR college OR education!.
* /25 operates next and creates a unit of bankrupt! /25 discharg!.
* AND, with the lowest priority, operates last and links the units formed in the second and third bullets above.

Is LexisNexis Still Relevant for Non-Lawrers?

Back when I used LN a lot, about ten years ago, the thing that made it useful to me even when searching through sources that were indexed elsewhere as well were the search terms like A w/5 B, which searches for term A within 5 words of B. That always produced much more relevant results than A and B, and despite all the praise of things like Pagerank, I've never seen a modern internet search engine give nearly as good of results as I was always able to find using this sort of technique.

Is this type of search still limited to LN, or are there ways to do the same sort of thing on Yahoo/Google/etc?

Re:Yes, you hate George Bush ...

Why would you bother writing such an inane and senseless post? Why does the fact that Bush will be gone in six months mean we have to stop talking about the crimes he and his administration committed? There is a reason we hate him, and it isn't just because he's a stupid, self obsessed, spoiled frat boy who somehow fooled the nation into voting for him twice. We hate him because he has tried to take away our rights.

You know, defending the man at this point is pretty much an admission that not only did you vote for him, twice, but you are too proud to admit you screwed up.

Re:Yes, you hate George Bush ...

Get over it. He'll be gone in six months.

Because, after all, the only reason to disagree with any of the things he and his cohorts have done is irrational hatred. It has nothing to do with subverting the Constitution he swore to protect, failing to prevent a major terrorist attack despite warnings, unapologetic law-breaking, stove-piping intelligence to justify a war of aggression and an occupation that's trashing our armed forces and our economy, gutting the balance of powers, alienating long-time allies, making the tax burden even more regressive, hamstringing prosecution of marketplace abuses, blatantly politicizing the Justice Department, rewriting science in the name of ideology, or any other similarly whiny little complaint.

Nope, those things are all just shallow excuses. It's all about the hate.

Re:You seem to lack perspective here

Yes, the House and Senate are somewhat complicit

Is that like being somewhat pregnant?

Re:LexisNexis Search?

It is THE most powerful database of public records and sometimes not-so public records in the entire world. You can start with a name and city and match a person and get social, dob, city of birth, all their criminal and civil cases, any citations including speeding tickets, any mention of them in other criminal or civil cases, news articles, legal findings etc. etc. etc.

Needless to say it is very dangerous in the wrong hands.

Re:LexisNexis Search?

Indeed. Our Sheriff's department uses it (along with other services by the same company), and it's downright scary the ammount of stuff they can pull.

Want all the blue and gray SUV's that have a 9 and an F within a 100 mile radius of a given location? It can pull that up. Want to find out if a particular person has ANY connection to the owner of that vehicle. It can do that. As a demonstration it was able to connect our sherrif to a woman that his wife had been roomates with over 20 years ago (before they were even married).

It was astonishing how much information it could coordinate on any person in the room that we plugged into it.

Also was tied into the sex offenders database. If you wanted to narrow that search for the blue/gray SUV earlier down to sexual offenders within a certain radius that owned or were associated with the owner of such a vehicle, then it could do that.

What's scary is that some level of this functionality is available to whoever wants to pay for it (afterall, most of the information is just public records correlated into a massive database). Law enforcement and such agencies do get more access (for instance, the ability to pull up social security numbers), but the average person with deep pockets could still get a hell of a lot of information for it. They do TRY to be secure with the LEO-only portions though.

Re:I don't understand...

This is the Department of Justice. It's supposed to be a neutral, non-partisan organization. Any overt partisan involvement should be a cause for alarm.

Re:I don't understand...

Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me with a straight face that President Clinton's administration didn't weed out conservatives from executive branch jobs?

Yes, of course -- since it is illegal to take political views into consideration for certain kinds of career non-political jobs. Federal law is very clear on this. Read the PDF linked in the story for more information.

Re:I don't understand...

First and foremost, because it's illegal.

But there are two types of nominations in the DoJ: "Career" & "Political". Political appointments are indeed open to scrutiny of political affiliation, but are temporary and remain active only until a change of administration. Career posts are normal jobs, and those people are supposed to be more neutral. Filtering people for Career jobs based on political affiliations is illegal. The issue coming to light now is that Bush administration officials used the same questionnaires and methods for both types of posts.

Re:I don't understand...

In the civil service, there is a clear line between "professionals" and "political appointees". The idea being, while the head of the justice department, and probably most of his deputies, change every administration, the people who actually understand the inner workings stay on.
If the search is used to vest someone's political position for a "political appointee" position, that's fine. If it's used the screen "technical/professional" candidates it's probably a violation of civil service provisions and most likely some statutes.

Because It's Illegal

There are certain high level posts in the various executive branch agencies that are tagged 'political appointments'. These jobs, which steer those agencies, can be determined based on politics.

For everything else, such discrimination is illegal. It is assumed, by the law, that people are professional enough to do their job regardless of who is in charge - and anyway, they can be fired if they intentionally sabotage the agency without legal cause.

Only recently, since the Neocons took over, has it even been an issue that 'attorneys hate' the people they work for. I mean, really, is such harsh language remotely accurate? Or is it being used as a boogie man in order to make an end-run around very wise laws; laws that prevent the government from swinging to extremes with every change in the administration.

(And lets not even bring up the fiscal nightmare it must be if agencies have to rehire everyone every eight years...)

Now, with my straight face: Clinton did NOT weed out conservatives from executive branch jobs. He in fact explicitly hired many people across the aisle, for better or for worse. The idea that you never hire people who disagree with you is one that has only seen it's heyday in the last eight years. It's actually often a very good idea.

Re:I don't understand...

Why shouldn't an administration be able to hire people on their side of the political fence?

Because it's illegal to do so for these types of Justice department jobs (and rightly so).

Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me with a straight face that President Clinton's administration didn't weed out conservatives from executive branch jobs?

For prosecutors in the justice department? I'll tell you that with a very straight face unless you can show otherwise. Everything I've read says this just doesn't happen for these kinds of appointees. The fired prosecutors were shocked to be fired for political reasons.

but I would assume that a given administration would not want to hire attorneys who hate everything that administration stands for, whether the administration is conservative, liberal or anything in between.

I find that a very strange attitude. Criminal prosecutions (which is what the Justice department does) shouldn't have a political slant to it. I'd hope you'd agree that that would be a horrible horrible thing no matter who was doing it. There's a reason why the image representing justice (the one holding the scales) is blindfolded.