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WASHINGTON — The investigations into the Bush administration's decision to fire nine U.S. attorneys have exposed how the administration has eroded the firewall between partisan politics and the Justice Department and compromised the independence of the nation's top law enforcement agency.

As early as 2002, administration policymakers, Republican legislators and GOP party officials began injecting politics into criminal investigations and civil- and voting-rights enforcement, and applying political litmus tests to judges and career lawyers at the Justice Department.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of thousands of Justice Department documents, congressional testimony, and interviews with current and former Justice Department officials reveals that the administration:

● Issued a series of directives to dismantle the boundaries between White House political operatives and the Justice Department, permitting a larger circle of aides to discuss pending investigations.

● Ignored the advice of Justice Department lawyers and crafted national security policies that pushed the limits of the law. In one case involving secret spying, at least 10 top department officials — including former Attorney General John Ashcroft and the head of the FBI — were prepared to resign in protest.

● Allowed political adviser Karl Rove and the White House Office of Political Affairs to become conduits for complaints about politically sensitive prosecutions or the prosecutors who were pursuing them.

● Fired some independent-minded U.S. attorneys and replaced them and some career Justice Department lawyers with young lawyers who had little trial experience but solid Republican Party credentials.

● Pushed states to purge their rolls of improperly registered voters, a campaign that critics charge hurt Democrats and helped Republicans.

White House officials deny that the administration has allowed partisan politics to taint the Justice Department and have defended last year's firings by emphasizing a president's right to change his appointees and blaming the prosecutors for failing to carry out President Bush's policies.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the congressional investigation proves only that the firings of the U.S. attorneys could have been "handled better" and that "it's clear that the attorney general did nothing wrong." Yet many of the nation's legal experts, including Republicans with long government service, see a troubling change in the administration of justice.

"We have a Justice Department that has substantially been turned into a political arm of the White House," said Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration.

The White House's first controversial foray into the nation's U.S. attorneys' offices came four years ago, in November 2002, when the administration announced that it was replacing the interim U.S. attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Weeks before he was demoted, Fred Black drafted a memo to his superiors at the Justice Department outlining a possible probe of super lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Black has charged that the timing of his removal was suspicious.

E-mails later made public revealed that Abramoff tried to press the Justice Department to remove Black because his support for a terrorism security assessment for the region threatened the lobbyist's clients, who depended on relaxed immigration policies for cheap labor.

Abramoff pleaded guilty separately last year to bribing or trying to bribe public officials from several states.

The attentiveness of Rove's office to politically charged cases reflects the Bush administration's relaxed attitude toward the boundaries between White House political operatives and the Justice Department.

In 2002, a Bush administration memo expanded the circle of people who could be party to discussions between the Justice Department and the White House about pending cases.

By the time Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was confirmed in February 2005, Kyle Sampson, a former White House personnel official who had moved to the Justice Department, was discussing with White House aides plans to fire some U.S. attorneys.

A year later, Gonzales signed a secret order authorizing Sampson and another politically connected staffer to make personnel decisions in his name.

Monica Goodling, a 33-year-old former Republican National Committee researcher who was the department's White House liaison, was permitted to make certain civil service hires.

She later testified to Congress that she "crossed the lines" by applying political litmus tests to career candidates, possibly in violation of department policy and the law. Among other things, she considered whether job seekers had campaigned for or donated to Bush.

Goodling resigned in April.

Justice Department officials also debated using a provision the department had slipped into the 2006 reauthorization of the Patriot Act that gave the Bush administration the power to install interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely without the consent of the Senate, a change that Congress has since reversed.

Documents gathered in congressional inquiries indicate that the department also considered removing 30 U.S. attorneys before settling on at least nine in eight states — Arizona, Arkansas, California, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico and Washington. Only one, Kevin Ryan in San Francisco, was known to have management problems. Most of the others had jurisdiction over sensitive political cases.

Meanwhile, the White House sought out replacement U.S. attorneys with strong Republican credentials.

Acting civil-rights chief Bradley Schlozman, who approved a decision to grant Justice Department approval for a controversial Georgia photo ID law for voters, was picked to serve as interim U.S. attorney in the swing state of Missouri. A federal judge struck down the law.

Rove protege Tim Griffin, a former opposition researcher for the Republican Party and a former member of the White House political affairs team, was tapped as interim prosecutor in Little Rock, Ark. Griffin, who declined to comment, resigned this month.

White House spokesman Fratto minimized the White House's role in most of those decisions. "Aside from the effort to appoint Tim Griffin to the U.S. attorney position in Arkansas, the White House did not add or remove any names from the list of U.S. attorneys named for replacement," he said.

In the final weeks before last November's pivotal congressional contests — in which the Democrats took back control of Congress after a dozen years — the Justice Department started stepping into close elections.

In New Mexico, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias received telephone calls from Republican Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Pete Domenici asking about a corruption investigation against local Democrats. Iglesias interpreted the calls as pressure to bring indictments before Election Day, but he declined to speed up the indictment.

He was fired last year.