Bloch who is under investigation for not only refusing to protect LGBT workers but also for allegedly retaliating against whistleblowers in his own office said he will leave at the end of his term rather than stay on until a replacement is found by the next administration.  Under federal law Bloch could stay for up to a year during the transition from Bush to the next administration.

Critics have termed Bloch’s tenure as special counsel as "bizarre," and lawmakers repeatedly have demanded he step down.

In 2004 he closed hundreds of whistle-blower cases allegedly without investigating them. Last year, the FBI raided Bloch’s office and home amid allegations that he destroyed evidence and potentially lied to Congress during an Office of Personnel Management investigation of his conduct.

OPM’s inspector general was investigating a complaint, filed by current and former Office of Special Counsel staffers, that Bloch intimidated and transferred employees who opposed his policies. The employees also accused Bloch of refusing to protect federal workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In December 2006, Bloch paid $1,149 in taxpayer money to have an outside tech company, Geeks on Call, scrub his government laptop computer, according to transcripts of an interview he gave to House investigators in March. At that time, Bloch told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff that the data wipe was done to protect government and personal information on the computer, not to destroy it.

Bloch’s stonewalling complaints of discrimination by LGBT federal workers dates to February 2004 when he ordered references to sexual orientation removed from the Office of the Special Counsel website. Since 1998, when President Bill Clinton issued an executive order prohibiting bias in the civil service, the OSC has taken that to include sexuality.

A month after the references disappeared from the OSC website Bloch said gay workers were no longer protected. 

After intense pressure from Federal Globe – the LGBT organization for federal civil servants – and from Democrats on The Hill, the White House said it would honor the Executive Order signed by Clinton that that had been taken as assurance LGBT workers had civil rights protections.

But with Bloch’s approval, several union contracts negotiated with various branches of the government removed the list of categories that are protected replacing them with the more nebulous phrase "any class protected by law." 

Appearing in May 2005, before the the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee on oversight of government management, the federal workforce and the District of Columbia, Bloch said that his interpretation of the Clinton executive order cannot be used to protect gay workers because it does not specifically name LGBT workers.

The Justice Department audit released Tuesday found that a screening program installed in 2002 weeded out job applicants who had liberal or Democratic ties. Improper use of the screening program peaked in 2006, when politics and ideology disqualified what the audit called a significant number of newly graduated lawyers and summer interns seeking jobs.

The long-awaited report confirms widespread criticism last year that the once fiercely independent Justice Department was victim to political meddling by the Bush administration. The scandal led to the resignation last September of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

“Many qualified candidates were deselected by the screening committee because of their perceived political or ideological affiliations” in 2006, the audit concludes.

It found that such disqualifications “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliation.”

Two of the people who ran the job applicant screening program in 2006 no longer work at Justice, however, and “are no longer subject to discipline by the department for their actions,” the report found.

Democrats quickly seized on the report to bludgeon the Bush administration for playing politics with law and order.

“Yet again, the department has been putting politics where it doesn’t belong,” House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said in a statement. “When it comes to the hiring of nonpartisan career attorneys, our system of justice should not be corrupted by partisan politics. It appears the politicization at Justice was so pervasive that even interns had to pass a partisan litmus test.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., called the audit “troubling” and said he expects to see more evidence later “on the extent to which the Bush administration has allowed politics to affect and infect the department’s priorities.”

The audit is the first of several reports to be issued this year looking at how deeply politics seeped into the Justice Department during the Bush administration. Internal Justice watchdogs – at the department’s Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility – also are looking at the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 and management problems by Gonzales during his two years as attorney general.