Add illegal hiring practices to the list of messes that will need cleaning up after the Bush administration departs Washington.

This long-running scandal involves the Justice Department and the heavy-handed abuse of the civil service system by highly placed partisan appointees. One of the many worrisome aspects of this is how many lawyers, who have a professional duty to report misconduct, looked the other way.

The Justice Department's inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility this week reported details about how political appointees violated federal law and agency policy in their hiring practices. Their main offense was to advance or reject candidates for career positions and assignments based on party loyalty and political ideology. Some of them also lied about what they had done.

Understand: The jobs in question were not political jobs, the kind that traditionally go to supporters of the party in power. These were civil service jobs that by law are to be filled on merit, not ideology and connections — the very kinds of jobs that civil service reforms were enacted to protect.

The department's most active offender, Monica Goodling, served as the agency's White House liaison under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales from April 2006 through April 2007. A graduate of Regent Law School, which was founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, she worked as a political researcher for the Republican National Committee for three years. She had been out of law school for only seven years when she was appointed White House liaison, a senior position that gave her broad authority over a wide variety of employment applications at the agency.

In May, Goodling told Congress — only after extracting a grant of immunity — about many of the improper practices in which she engaged. This week's report put meat on the bones of her admissions.

It revealed how, in case after case, partisan affiliation, positions on political issues and even perceived sexual orientation determined who got hired and what jobs they got. It described how a merit system for selecting and promoting immigration judges was corrupted. The department's hiring system became, in effect, an arm of the White House patronage office.

Under the law, the administration was permitted to fill numerous Justice Department jobs with political and ideological appointees. It did so, and some of the appointees were well qualified. But the partisan operatives in charge of Gonzales' Justice Department were intent on packing the ranks of career professionals with their pals, too.

The cadre of young lawyers running the Justice Department job shop were not subtle. They were explicit in the pursuit of their mission. Their memos and e-mails were littered with references to hiring "good Americans" — code for candidates with Republican credentials. In vetting candidates, Goodling and her minions conducted online searches that included "religious" and "homosexual" among the search terms.

That would be discrimination in any business. But this was the United States Department of Justice, an agency dedicated to upholding the law. As officers of the court, lawyers have a duty to report professional misconduct to the organizations that issue licenses to practice law and oversee their use in the various states and the District of Columbia. The rules couldn't be more explicit and are expressed in the profession's model code:

"A lawyer who knows that another lawyer has committed a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct that raises a substantial question as to that lawyer's honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer ... shall inform the appropriate professional authority."

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, appointed to clean up the mess that Gonzales left behind, pledged to restore America's "confidence in the propriety of what we do and how we do it." With the new report now in hand, he should examine closely why so many lawyers stood mute for so long.

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