1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

The civil rights division is the part of the Justice Department that enforces voting rights laws, fights discrimination, and prosecutes hate crimes. For decades, under presidents of both parties, it attracted some of the best legal talent in the country. That changed last year. Since early 2025, more than 300 career employees have left the division. These are nonpolitical lawyers with decades of experience. They left after Trump’s pick to run the division turned it into a tool for the president’s agenda. Now the department has to fill those seats. It has hired about 130 new lawyers, and the New York Times has been looking into who they are. These are not the people who used to get these jobs. For a long time, you got hired into the civil rights division because you were one of the best lawyers in the country. Now you get hired because you’re loyal to Trump. And when loyalty is the qualification, you end up with hires like these. One of them is a man who hacked into a Florida county’s election system. Not once, but twice. A Florida court also found he committed fraud in a business dispute and ordered him to pay more than 200 thousand dollars. But the Justice Department decided he was the right guy to monitor a polling place in Minneapolis back in August. Another one is a prosecutor who got pulled off a murder case after a judge found he viewed and shared the defense team’s privileged communications. That’s about as serious as it gets for a lawyer. He’s now enforcing civil rights law. Another is facing animal neglect charges in El Paso. The Times asked his former supervisor whether the department should have hired him. She said no. Then she corrected herself: “Hell, no.” And then there’s the new senior counsel who suggested January 6th was a false flag run by liberals. This guy is now a senior lawyer in the division that’s supposed to protect your right to vote. The civil rights division was built to be nonpolitical. That’s the only reason it works. Fill it with people whose main qualification is loyalty to Trump, and it stops being a safeguard and starts being a weapon. And right now it’s pointed at the election.