Bradley Schlozman earned a reputation as something of a ‘vote fraud’ wrecking ball during his tenure as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and later as an interim U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Missouri. But when Schlozman went to Capitol Hill Tuesday to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the wrecking ball ran into a buzzsaw, and the result… was a train wreck.

We give you the highlights, or lowlights, in today’s episode of TPMtv.

Schlozman figures into the U.S. Attorney Purge story in a number of ways, but his central role was pushing voter suppression efforts around the country using the power of the Department of Justice and specifically his office as U.S. Attorney in Kansas City. The idea was to suppress minority voter turnout in key swing states to help Republican candidates, under the assumption that minorities tend to vote disproportionately for Democrats.

What the senators keyed in on during Schlozman’s testimony was something he did just days prior to the November 2006 midterm elections, while he was serving as a non-Senate-confirmed interim U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, appointed under the USA Patriot Act. He brought a series of vote fraud indictments just prior to the elections. This goes against explicit Department of Justice guidelines. You’re not supposed to bring politically tinged indictments, especially for election/voting crimes, just before an election because, quite obviously, it could have the direct effect of influencing the election by suppressing voter turnout.

So members of the Senate Judiciary Committee aimed to find out why Schlozman violated DOJ guidelines to bring these vote fraud indictments just in time for the election in an apparent effort to suppress voter turnout.

What follows in today’s episode is a montage of some of the most maddening/depressing/torturous/unintentionally hilarious – depending on your particular worldview – segments of Schlozman’s testimony. Raw footage of the hearing was provided to TPMtv by CapNews.Net.

If you don’t have the time/masochistic élan to watch the montage, the crux of it is that Schlozman could offer no explanation nor excuse for his action other than the paltry line that he simply did not think the charge (brought five days before the November midterm elections, at the climax of one of the closest Senate races in the country, and publicized at the time in no uncertain terms) “was going to have any effect on the election in this case.” The first time Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT) heard those words come out of Schlozman’s mouth he replied incredulously, “You’re amazing.”

Actually, Schlozman did have one other fallback line: that he consulted with Craig Donsanto, the director of the Election Crimes branch of the Justice Department, about the indictments before issuing them and Donsanto gave him the green light. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pressed Schlozman particularly hard on this, and Schlozman testified that if questioned, Donsanto would state explicitly and without reservation that he did in fact OK the issuing of the indictments.

The reason that Schumer was so suspicious about Donsanto signing off on pre-election vote fraud indictments is that Donsanto is the one who actually wrote the Department of Justice manual that includes the guideline about not issuing such indictments.

After the testimony we found an e-mail from one of those DOJ document dumps from David Iglesias of all people, the fired U.S. Attorney from New Mexico. Iglesias worked with Donsanto in 2004 and he offers a starkly different rendition of Donsanto’s position on issuing election-timed indictments from the one offered by Schlozman in his testimony.

Mr. Donsanto can in all likelihood expect a letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee shortly. Of course we’ll keep looking at it ourselves and we’ll bring you more as we find it.