A former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents.
A onetime gambling executive who promoted conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017.
A Florida activist who once served 20 days in jail for hacking a local elections system.
They are among the 130 lawyers who have recently joined the Justice Department’s short-staffed civil rights division as the Trump administration has struggled to fill the depleted ranks of a unit that was once a magnet for legal talent. Since early 2025, upward of 300 nonpolitical career employees, representing decades of experience, have left the division after its leader, Harmeet Dhillon, repurposed it to pursue President Trump’s agenda.
As a consequence, the division has opened its doors to recruits, many of them conservatives, some with education and work histories that might have disqualified them from being hired in the past, former officials said. Some have left a trail of hyperpartisan, conspiratorial and, in some instances, bizarre statements, according to an examination of about a dozen recent hires based on court records, social media posts and interviews.
Department officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said they have rejected nearly as many applicants as they have hired, 126. Any ideological tilt in the career ranks, they added, reflected the Trump-era applicant pool, which includes conservative activists and recent law school graduates.
Ms. Dhillon praised the quality of the new lawyers, and said she was revamping a division that had been dominated by liberals for far too long.
“For years, the civil rights division recruited from a narrow pipeline of progressive activists and called it excellence,” she said in a statement.
“We are hiring trial lawyers,” she added. “The attorneys The Times singled out have collectively tried hundreds of cases, prosecuted those who prey on trafficked children, won at the Supreme Court and practiced law for decades. That is the experience this division needs to enforce civil rights laws for every American.”
Among her top hires: The gun rights activist Barry Arrington, the acting chief of a new Second Amendment unit, is a high-profile opponent of the theory of evolution and same-sex marriage. Last year, he successfully argued before the Supreme Court against Colorado’s ban on so-called conversion therapy.
The person she appointed to temporarily lead the voting section — the epicenter of the department’s aggressive actions ahead of the midterm elections — is Eric Neff, who tried more than 50 criminal cases during a 12-year career as a prosecutor in California. His stint as a prosecutor in Los Angeles County ended in rancor.
In 2022, Mr. Neff was placed on administrative leave after the office withdrew his indictment of an executive at a software company for storing data on poll workers on a Chinese server. His bosses cited irregularities in the case. The county ended up paying the company $5 million in a settlement.
Mr. Neff was reinstated in 2024 and has filed a whistle-blower claim against the county, which remains unresolved.
Questions for individual prosecutors and officials were routed to the Justice Department’s public affairs office, in keeping with longstanding policy. A department spokeswoman, Kiersten Pels, defended Mr. Neff’s appointment, citing his experience, “50 jury trials in cases ranging from fraud to multiple homicides” and his earlier career as an investigative reporter.
Critics have raised questions about lawyers assigned to crack down on voter fraud, which includes a thus-far unsuccessful effort to obtain sensitive state voter roll information, and the deployment of 1,000 election monitors across the country.
On the day of Minnesota’s primary elections in August, two Justice Department officials approached a polling place in Minneapolis and were reminded by a local election worker to obey a law requiring them to stay outside at a certain distance, a video showed.
One of the department officials, David Michael Levin, a conservative lawyer and businessman, was himself a convicted lawbreaker.
In 2015 and 2016, Mr. Levin twice hacked into the Lee County, Fla., election system as a political stunt. He faced felony charges before pleading to a pair of misdemeanors in September 2016, and served a 20-day jail sentence with two years of probation, according to court records.
His application, like all the others, was reviewed and approved by the department’s personnel office. His record alone would not have precluded him from being hired — the department is allowed after seven years to hire people who committed misdemeanors. But critics said it set a dangerous precedent.
“Deploying politically motivated individuals to carry out D.O.J.’s poll-monitoring efforts threatens to undermine Americans’ faith in the electoral process ahead,” Senator Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, wrote to Ms. Dhillon last month after seeing the video.
In recent years, Mr. Levin and his wife have been associated with a company that provides customer leads to insurance companies, and have been embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with a client who accused them of providing unusable leads, court records showed.
Judges in the case repeatedly called out the Levins for not turning over documents demanded by the court. In April 2026, a district court judge in Florida cited them for “willful and bad faith disregard” of court orders, rules and discovery procedures, according to court filings.
In August, the court ordered Mr. Levin to pay more than $200,000 in damages and lawyers fees, finding that he had engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation and civil conspiracy, according to a ruling last month. The docket shows no record yet of the Levins filing an appeal.
Mr. Levin’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. (None of the prosecutors mentioned in this story, including Mr. Levin, responded to personal requests for comment).
The Justice Department official accompanying Mr. Levin also had a notable history. He is William Mohrman, a lawyer in Minnesota who represented Minneapolis police officers charged in connection with the murder of George Floyd. He has also represented the civil rights division in voter roll cases.
Another lawyer working on elections litigation is David Vandenberg, who joined as a criminal trial attorney in the civil rights division in August 2025.
For several years, Mr. Vandenberg served as a prosecutor in Texas and New Mexico. His 22-month stint as an assistant district attorney in El Paso appears to have been a troubled one: He faced serious complaints about his volatile behavior toward colleagues, his former supervisor said, allegations earlier reported by Bloomberg Law.
In an interview with The New York Times, his former supervisor, Penny Hamilton, recalled intervening after two incidents of yelling. In one, Mr. Vandenberg berated a co-worker during a dispute over a photocopier. In another, a local judge barred Mr. Vandenberg from a courtroom after he chided a court official.
Asked if Mr. Vandenberg should have been hired by the Justice Department, Ms. Hamilton replied, “No,” then amended her statement to, “Hell, no.”
He is currently facing charges of animal neglect, according to El Paso municipal court records, charges often filed when dogs are found unattended for an extended period in a parked vehicle.
In 2025, a cellphone photo of Mr. Vandenberg appeared on a news station after a local mother accused him of intentionally sideswiping her car, with her two young children inside, flashing his district attorney badge and fleeing the scene. He was not charged. The woman is currently suing him over the incident.
Ms. Pels defended Mr. Vandenberg’s record. He is “a dedicated prosecutor who spent years in New Mexico and Texas prosecuting cases on behalf of child victims of human trafficking, sexual assault and murder,” she said.
An official with knowledge of his hiring who requested anonymity to discuss personnel matters said that he had never been reprimanded by his previous employer, that he had denied wrongdoing and that he expected both matters to be resolved soon.
Khalil H. Quinan was hired in May as a prosecutor in the civil rights division’s criminal unit after nearly a decade in the Florida state attorney’s office, where he handled a range of gun, gang and violent crime cases.
In 2025, Mr. Quinan was forced to step aside as a lead prosecutor in the murder trial of Courtney Clenney, an OnlyFans model accused of killing her boyfriend, after the judge ruled that he viewed and shared iCloud files explicitly marked as privileged communications between Ms. Clenney’s parents and defense lawyers.
The judge dismissed Mr. Quinan’s claim that the material was permissible because it did not directly involve Ms. Clenney. In February 2025, the judge ordered him to sit for a sworn deposition after finding a second possible violation of attorney-client privilege. He withdrew from the case soon afterward.
Mr. Quinan was not disciplined. Ms. Clenney eventually reached a plea deal to serve six years in prison.
Ms. Pels said the Justice Department stood by the hiring of Mr. Quinan, describing him as a top-flight prosecutor who “acted in full compliance with his supervisors’ directives” n
James Breslo, hired in January, is part of the team suing the University of California, Los Angeles medical school for discriminating against white applicants. He is a former gambling executive and business lawyer who has hosted a podcast called “Hidden Truth.” Episodes included “AA Kills,” a takedown of Alcoholics Anonymous, and a deep dive into the origin of U.F.O.s. In 2018, he hosted the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who promoted her unsubstantiated claim that the man who killed 58 people on the Las Vegas Strip in 2017 was working for either Islamic terrorists or the government.
Mr. Breslo, in an essay posted weeks before the 2024 election, suggested President Barack Obama had “no love or reverence for the U.S. Constitution.” He claimed Ms. Harris embraced “a political system antithetical” to the country’s founding principles, something he said was “not surprising given her upbringing” by parents who were not U.S. citizens at the time she was born.
Mr. Breslo “brings decades of legal and executive experience” to his job, Ms. Pels said.
Daniel Flickinger, who began working on the division’s education cases earlier this year, was forced out of his job at a Birmingham, Ala., law firm in 2020 after suggesting — to the disgust of his bosses — that Mr. Floyd was fortunate to have died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”
Mr. Flickinger maintained that his statement, posted to his private Facebook page, was never intended to be publicly disseminated. He later sued another lawyer for disseminating what he claimed to be defamatory comments about the post. Since then, he has worked in private practice, specializing in areas of law overseen by the division, Ms. Pels said.
Peter Feaman, a veteran lawyer from Florida hired in early 2025 as a senior counsel, has a history of far-right political statements. In a May 2021 post on social media, he accused the “diabolical” Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, of forcing citizens into getting the “mark of the beast” (a coronavirus shot).
Mr. Feaman also suggested that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was a false-flag operation orchestrated by liberals he likened to the Nazis. Trump voters, unlike the German citizens who kept silent in the 1930s, “have guns,” he wrote in a post.
One of his books, “Wake Up, America!,” includes a rave review on the dust jacket from The Times that never existed, according to a CNN report in 2021, written when Mr. Feaman was a member of the Republican National Committee.
Ms. Pels said Mr. Feaman’s work should be considered separately from his social media profile. “His years-old personal social media posts have nothing to do with his legal work, and resurfacing them is not a serious assessment of his qualifications,” she added.
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