April 29, 2025 Story by Publisher
The voting section had seven managers in January overseeing around 30 attorneys. Of the two other managers, one retired and another was detailed to work on an antisemitism task force.
Political appointees have also instructed career employees to dismiss all of their active cases without meeting with them and offering a rationale – a significant break with the department’s practices and norms.
The justice department did not return a request for comment.
Taken together, the changes have raised significant alarm about what the future of voting rights enforcement will look like for the federal government at a moment when states continue to pass restrictive voting measures.
It also raises concerns about future political interference. The justice department’s civil rights division has long had resources and a credibility that private plaintiffs can’t match. Much of that reputation is driven by the fact that the day-to-day work is carried out by non-political, career staff, whose work is supposed to be apolitical.
“The career managers established norms and standards and made sure that the section spoke consistently, over time, with one voice,” said a former justice department employee. “That is destroyed by gutting all the career managers.”
The voting section dismissed its last active case on Monday – a challenge under the Voting Rights Act to how the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, elects its city council. In March, it also dismissed a similar case in Houston County, Georgia. (The department technically has one voting case that is still active, but a judge paused the case this week).
The changes are part of a larger wave of about a dozen reassignments of senior personnel in the civil rights division this week. Several other components of the division, including the special litigation section, have also been hit with significant losses in personnel. The moves came a week ahead of a 28 April deadline for employees to decide whether to accept a deferred resignation offer.
Reassigning the most experienced managers to low-level duties appears to be an overt push to crush morale, make it clear management is not going to bring civil rights enforcement cases, and get lawyers to accept the offer to leave the department, department veterans say. Many of the division’s lawyers are expected to accept the offer.
“This is what you do when you don’t really know what the section does and just want to create chaos in the simplest way possible that doesn’t involve you reading anything,” said one former voting section attorney. “It is extremely clear that the intent is to get absolutely nothing done. And the effect will be that absolutely nothing gets done.”
Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his effort to try and overturn the 2020 election, has called for mass firings in the civil rights division. “Every lawyer in the Voting Section and likely in the Civil Rights Division needs to be terminated. They are not supportive of Pres Trump or MAGA. There has to be a reckoning. These are leftwing activists who have come from and should return to their leftwing organizations,” she wrote in a post on X shortly after the election.
The American Accountability Foundation, a dark money group that created a“DEI watch list” of federal employees, also sent a letter to the attorney general, Pam Bondi, last year urging her to fire certain lawyers in the voting section.
Removing the career managers is hugely consequential in the justice department. In addition to having decades of experience, they act as a buffer between the political attorneys in a section’s front office and the apolitical career line attorneys. They review investigations and justification memos arguing for bringing cases or not, and present them to the political appointees.
They also handle hiring. While there’s currently a hiring freeze, removing the career managers could pave the way for politicized hiring and a “partisan and ideological capture” of an agency that is supposed to be non-partisan, a former department employee said.
“Demolishing the line between career and political employees is very possible, because the people who run the hiring process are normally the career managers, but if you replace all the career managers and then have new political people they could staff up very differently,” the former department employee said.
Since the start of the Trump administration, the Justice Department has dismissed big cases challenging a sweeping voting law in Georgia and a major case challenging electoral districts drawn in Texas. It has also dismissed cases in Virginia and Alabama that sought to stop the states from being too aggressive in removing people from their voter rolls.
Before the Texas redistricting case was dismissed, there was a perfunctory meeting between political appointees and career staff in which political appointees had not bothered to read materials in advance, according to the former department employee. They have refused meetings to discuss dismissals since, the person said, and political appointees have not even bothered to learn the names of career attorneys.
“Even if you don’t think that some claims should have been brought, it’s not plausible that every case in the hopper is unmerited, by any interpretation of the rules,” said Justin Levitt, a former top official in the civil rights division during the Obama administration. “An instruction to drop a case without an explanation of why is just a decision to refuse to enforce the law.”
“Dropping those cases without explanation is simply arbitrary – and ‘arbitrary’ is exactly what you don’t want from the country’s lead agency of law enforcement,” he added.
In some cases, justice department leadership has publicly antagonized the work of career personnel. On 31 March, Bondi issued a press release announcing she had ordered the department to dismiss its challenge to the Georgia voting law, saying the Biden administration had “fabricated a narrative”. Chad Mizelle, the department’s chief of staff, called the suit a “disgrace”.
People familiar with the voting section emphasized that the administration’s approach is significantly different from the way the section was run during the first Trump term. Even though the voting section’s work slowed considerably during Trump’s first term, and it switched positions in some major cases, there was a general respect and collegiality for the career employees. Eric Dreiband, who led the civil rights division from 2018 to 2021, resigned after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Source: The Guardian
