On a variety of issues, including voting rights and employment discrimination, Ashcroft aides have moved to limit the input of career employees, in some cases meeting with defendants without informing the career lawyers handling the cases or allowing them to be present, career lawyers said.

Political staff also took control of the department's consideration of Mississippi's redistricting plan, sources said, and rejected career lawyers' recommendation to approve a plan proposed by the state's Democratic-controlled legislature. After delays, a panel of three Republican federal judges approved a plan favorable to Rep. Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr. (R-Miss.), whose district was affected by the redistricting.

Ashcroft aides describe the actions as part of the normal process of a new administration taking over an agency previously led from a different political viewpoint.

But the conflict at the Civil Rights Division is notable for its intensity and its potential political significance. Ashcroft, a former senator from Missouri with close ties to the Christian right, has been under scrutiny from the beginning of his tenure for how he might handle politically sensitive civil rights issues.

Now, career lawyers contend their division's enforcement of civil rights laws is being compromised.

"There's a lot of fear among attorneys and other staff in the division," said one lawyer in the division, who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal. "It's a fear about our cases, their future, the investigations we're doing."

Civil Rights Assistant Attorney General Ralph F. Boyd Jr. yesterday rejected the characterization of his division as politicized.

"Is my probing, questioning style going to shake things up? Certainly," Boyd said. "Is it going to make some people uncomfortable? Perhaps. But that's worked for me in the past. . . . This is a principled, deliberative decision-making process that we're engaged in."

But concern over the changes has spread among advocacy groups and Democrats. On Wednesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) sent a letter to Ashcroft, asking questions about how the division is being run.

"You stated repeatedly at your confirmation hearing that it is an Attorney General's duty to enforce the law as written, regardless of his or her personal beliefs," Leahy wrote. But the "considerable changes in the upper echelons of the Department's career ranks raise concerns about the reasons for the changes and their effect on the Department's important mission."

In addition to the meetings with defendants' attorneys and the Mississippi redistricting case, career lawyers, congressional sources and civil rights groups have taken issue with the hiring of two conservative operatives as career lawyers and the reassignment of two top career officials in the Employment Litigation Section.

Of the two political operatives hired, one is a former employee of the Voting Integrity Project, which ran the disputed purging of Florida voter rolls of alleged felons during the 2000 election, and the other is a former senior counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, an organization that has been sharply critical of preferential affirmative action policies. They will be part of a voting-rights task force Ashcroft announced last year, to be headed by a political appointee.

The two officials in the Employment Litigation Section were reassigned to a task force on employment discrimination -- some colleagues say in retaliation for their pursuit of employment discrimination cases and defense of affirmative action.

In addition, congressional sources noted that Viet D. Dinh, assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Policy, last month directed six former division lawyers and one current lawyer not to discuss "internal communications or deliberations" with Senate Judiciary Committee staff investigating civil rights cases handled by District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr., whose nomination to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.

In an interview yesterday, Boyd acknowledged that he or his staff sometimes meet with defendants' counsel. It is part of his "open door" policy, he explained.

"In many instances, the career staff is present," he said. "Sometimes they are not."

He said he never held such meetings without letting career staff know. The idea that such meetings undermine the lawyers' work is "flat out wrong," he said.

In the Mississippi redistricting case, he said, "that's a decision that I alone made," and "it completely comported with the deliberative process that we undertake in making decisions here."

He acknowledged hiring Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former board member of the Voting Integrity Project, and Hugh Joseph Beard, former senior counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, as career lawyers in the voting rights section. He said they were experienced trial lawyers and that "when I look at people for assignments, frankly, I'm not interested at all in their ideology. What I'm interested in is their professionalism as lawyers."

He also acknowledged reassigning Katherine A. Baldwin, chief of the Employment Litigation Section, to the employment discrimination task force, and said the task force was crucial to the department.

"The importance of this task force is reflected in who I've asked to take the laboring oar, Kay Baldwin," he said.

He also wants Deputy Chief Richard S. Ugelow to join the task force, but said the move had not been finalized. "These are two folks who have litigated these cases for years and years and years," he said. "They are both excellent teachers."

Although the Dinh letters focused on the confidentiality of internal communications, congressional sources said they were concerned because the letters involved a case that Pickering had closed years ago.

On Feb. 13, four committee investigators were well into a speaker-phone interview with former division lawyer Bradford M. Berry about the case when they received a fax from Dinh to Leahy. The Justice Department did not object to "this highly unusual interview," it said, but there was a chance that "public revelation" of "deliberative discussions" could hamper department lawyers' effectiveness. Therefore, Dinh was directing Berry -- who was read the letter over the phone -- not to answer "any such questions."

The investigators asked no more questions about deliberations. Dinh sent similar letters to five other former department lawyers and one current one.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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