authority to senior DOJ staff Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson to hire and dismiss political appointees and some civil service positions. On May 2, 2007, the Department of Justice announced two separate investigations into hirings conducted by Goodling: one by the department's Inspector General, and a second by the Office of Professional Responsibility. In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, on May 23, 2007, Goodling stated that she had "crossed the line" and broken civil service laws regulating hiring for civil service positions, and had improperly weighed political factors in assessing applicants. According to a January 2009 Justice Department report, investigators found that Bradley Schlozman, as interim head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, "favored applicants with conservative political or ideological affiliations and disfavored applicants with civil rights or human rights experience whom he considered to be overly liberal". The positions under consideration were not political, but career, for which the political and ideological views of candidates are not to be considered, according to federal law and guidelines. In a letter of May 30, 2007, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and Counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility confirmed that they were expanding their investigation beyond "the removals of United States Attorneys" to include "DOJ hiring and personnel decisions" by Monica Goodling and other Justice Department employees. Dismissed attorneys and elections The controversy surrounding the U.S. Attorneys dismissals was often linked to elections or voter-fraud issues. Allegations were that some of the U.S. Attorneys were dismissed for failing to instigate investigations damaging to Democratic politicians, or for failing to more aggressively pursue voter-fraud cases. Such allegations were made by some of the dismissed U.S. Attorneys themselves to suggest reasons they may have been dismissed. The background to the allegations is the recent tendency for elections in parts of the United States to be very close; an election outcome can be affected by an announced investigation of a politician. It is explicit policy of the Department of Justice to avoid bringing voter-related cases during an election for this reason. In September 2008, the Inspector General for the Department of Justice concluded that some of the dismissals were motivated by the refusal of some of the U.S. Attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases during the 2006 election cycle. Fallout By April 2007, there was some speculation that