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Former Department of Justice (DOJ) smut-buster J. Robert Flores, a golf devotee, is so eager to share his favorite pastime with inner-city teens that he recently tossed ethics aside to award
a $500,000 grant to the First Tee Program, a World Golf Foundation bid to bring
the joys of the putting green to disadvantaged youth.

As administrator of the DOJ's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), Flores dispenses the annual National Juvenile Justice Programs grants. Out of 104 candidates competing for 11 grants in fiscal year 2007, First Tee had been ranked 47th and marked "not recommended" by DOJ grant evaluators. What seems to have trumped that assessment is that First Tee's honorary chairman is former President George H.W. Bush, and that Flores enjoys a warm relationship with World Golf Foundation officials who provide him with such perks as waived green fees.

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San Diego's Vista Community Clinic / Project Reach, the applicant Flores's underlings ranked highest, got no money at all -- evidently because of its dedication to sex education and condom distribution. The second-place applicant, a National Juvenile Detention Association program designed to train guards to deal humanely with juvenile offenders, was also turned down. Among the top 20 candidates, only three received funds.

The organization ranked 32nd on the assessment list -- the Christian-flavored anti-porn group Enough Is Enough, headed by bimbo-turned-activist Donna Rice Hughes, Flores's former colleague on the Congressionally-appointed Child Online Protection Act commission -- received $750,000, however.

More egregiously, the Best Friends Foundation, an abstinence bandwagon headed by morality maven William Bennett's wife, received $1.1 million -- twice the funding it requested -- despite placing 53rd.

None of the funding recipients offers sex education or provides abortion counseling. At no point in Flores's six years as grant administrator has he permitted grant money to go to any program, group, or agency dealing with gay and lesbian youth.

Of greenbacks & greens

The youth-service journal Youth Today raised questions about the grants earlier this year. Now, with the aid of anonymous former colleagues still at the agency, ex-OJJDP employee Scott Peterson has come forward to accuse Flores of cronyism and fraud. In June, his efforts resulted in a damning investigative report on ABC's Nightline, and hearings before U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-California) House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Subpoenaed to appear, Flores admitted that he had "initially" accepted a free round of golf at a St. Augustine fairway, but denied giving preference to First Tees.

ABC News discovered that Flores met with a World Golf Foundation official in 2007, and subsequently directed DOJ staff to help facilitate First Tee's grant application. Documents smuggled out of the OJJDP by anonymous career employees support Peterson's assertions that Flores routinely ignores the recommendations of DOJ's professional grant reviewers.

Flores was a New York prosecutor before joining the DOJ during the Reagan Administration. He and notorious anti-porn zealot Bruce Taylor were assigned to Attorney General Ed Meese's National Obscenity Enforcement Unit (NOEU), which in the early '90s became the more ostensibly high-minded Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), with Flores serving for a time as acting deputy chief. He helped conduct constitutionally dubious sting operations and was a driving force behind Operation Innocent Images, targeting putative child-porn trading on AOL.

After Bill Clinton succeeded George H.W. Bush as president, Flores followed Bruce Taylor to the National Law Center for Children and Families, a private, nonprofit resource for porn vigilantes. In 1999 to 2000, Flores served on a commission seeking unsuccessfully to craft a challenge-proof revision of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), legislation repeatedly blocked and overturned as unconstitutional, most recently in July by the U.S. Third Circurt Court of Appeals.

Early in George W. Bush's two-term reign, Flores returned to the DOJ in his present capacity. His official biography boasts that under his leadership, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has "significantly increased the involvement of faith-based... organizations in its programming." A born-again father of three whose favorite movie is Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, Flores frequently addresses Republican audiences hungry for bromides about old-time values.