Media accounts have cast departing Justice Department lawyers as principled nonpartisan civil servants too conscientious to serve a politicized Trump administration. But several of these lawyers have taken up very political roles after they’ve left the department. 

Dan Freeman, the litigation director for the Democratic National Committee, touted his time in the Justice Department in a fundraising email this week, asserting the Trump administration “forced out brilliant lawyers” and “directed us to drop crucial cases.”

“I spent almost 15 years at the DOJ as a voting rights lawyer. I was a civil servant, and I loved enforcing the Voting Rights Act on behalf of the American people,” Freeman’s letter says. “I helped stop voter purges in Alabama and gerrymandering in Texas. But everything changed when President Trump returned to the White House.”

Freeman vowed the DNC is “going to use legal action to enforce voting rights laws when states around the country violate them, and we’ll intervene and defend your right to vote when the Republican Party tries to make it harder for you to cast a ballot that will be counted.”

In response to an inquiry from The Daily Signal, Freeman said in a written statement, “This isn’t about party, it’s about democracy.”

While such a comment might sound trite to some, it’s likely genuine coming from Freeman and other former DOJ lawyers who moved into liberal advocacy, said former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams, now the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election integrity group. 

“These lawyers generally think they are fighting for civil rights and voting rights as they see it, and really don’t view it as partisan,” Adams told The Daily Signal. “They think they are doing the same thing for Democrats and liberal activist groups as they did in the Justice Department. I’ve talked to them, I know.”

Freeman garnered attention during the 2013 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama when he heckled and led a chorus of boos against then-Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who had been the vice presidential nominee on the losing Republican ticket. 

Before the Justice Department hired him as a career employee during the Obama administration, Freeman worked for the New York Civil Liberties Union. He was also a co-chair of the Yale Law School Democrats and a member of the left-leaning American Constitution Society.

Left-leaning media outlets have regularly characterized Justice Department lawyers who either resigned or who were fired as nonpartisan civil servants standing against a politicized Trump administration. 

For example, MSNBC heralded the “principled resignation era” at the DOJ. CBS News framed a story as DOJ employees departing as a stand against changing norms at the department. Ms. Magazine cast a “profiles in courage” story about lawyers who left. 

While not directly working for the Democratic Party, at least three other recently departed Justice Department lawyers went to work for Democracy Forward, a liberal litigation group that has been involved in multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration. The group’s chairman is Marc Elias, a longtime election lawyer for the DNC and various Democrat candidates, including Hillary Clinton and her 2016 presidential campaign. 

The former DOJ lawyers now working for the Elias-led group are Joshua Salzman, Amy Vickery, and Simon Brewer. 

Salzman is the senior counsel for Democracy Forward. He had worked for the Justice Department for 10 years, most recently as the assistant director with the DOJ’s civil division’s appellate staff. 

Vickery is a Democracy Forward oversight attorney, and was previously a DOJ trial attorney in the civil rights division. 

Brewer is now the Democracy Forward senior staff attorney after being an attorney on the appellate staff of the DOJ’s civil division. 

Democracy Forward did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal Wednesday or Thursday. 

“We are thrilled to welcome our newest team members as we continue to grow and expand our ability to meet the administration’s harmful and unlawful conduct with swift legal action while also continuing our impactful and necessary work in state and local communities,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, in a July 1 statement announcing the new hires.

The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a critical report on the department’s voting section in 2013 that found problems of bias, unprofessional treatment of colleagues based on political views, and that attorneys for the section were primarily hired from liberal legal organizations such as the ACLU.

Stacey Young was an 18-year veteran of the Justice Department and a senior attorney in the civil division. She founded the DOJ Gender Equality Network, or DOJ GEN, and was its president before she left the DOJ in January. She went on to found the Justice Connection, where she is the executive director. 

The Justice Connection describes itself as a network of DOJ alumni working to protect their former colleagues who it says are under attack. The alumni network is under the fiscal sponsorship of the Government Accountability Project, a left-leaning watchdog group. 

“Federal law prohibits taking political affiliation into consideration when making career employee hiring decisions,” Young told The Daily Signal in a statement. “Attorneys who choose to work at the Justice Department take an oath to serve and uphold the Constitution, not an individual or a political party.”

“It is rare that those serving together know the political leanings of their colleagues. Only in this administration has the attorney general considered department lawyers to be the president’s lawyers and has made hiring or firing decisions based on loyalty to an elected official.”

But Adams, of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said the lawyers have a blindspot to their own partisanship.

“It’s not that their heart beats Democrat as much as it beats progressive activism,” Adams said. “That makes it all the more dangerous. Some of the worst actors in history believed they were doing the right thing.”

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