A former Justice Department official seemingly violated the law over the weekend by imploring Donald Trump loyalists to apply for jobs as federal prosecutors, according to experts.
Chad Mizelle, a former DOJ chief of staff, issued a public call on social media for MAGA attorneys to apply for jobs under Attorney General Pam Bondi and suggested he could help them toward that goal through his own connections, and a former federal prosecutor told ABC News that was clearly a violation of department policy and likely a crime.
"We shouldn't have a favorite politician in the Justice Department," said former prosecutor Perry Carbone. "We should have a favorite document, and that's the Constitution."
Mizelle, who served as a top adviser to Bondi during her first seven months on the job, urged pro-Trump lawyers to apply for jobs as assistant U.S. attorneys and invited applicants to send him a direct message, and Carbone said the post had "generated a lot of discussion" among former federal prosecutors.
"It's dangerous," said Carbone, who served until May as chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. "The day that Department of Justice lawyers are hired based on loyalty to a person ... is the day the rest of us should get very nervous."
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Jason Reding Quinones, who is currently U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, shared Mizelle's post on their own social media accounts, and Carbone said all of those posts "flatly contradict" federal laws and regulations regarding the hiring of career federal employees based on their "political affiliation."
"The law is very clear," Carbone said.
The Justice Department's manual also makes clear that personnel decisions on career positions must be made without regard for an applicant's political affiliation, he added.
"Efforts to influence personnel decisions concerning career positions on partisan grounds should be reported to the Deputy Attorney General," the manual states.
Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, a conservative Trump critic, also called out Mizelle's invitation as improper.
"If support for [the current] president is now a condition of enforcing federal law, Congress should defund DOJ," McCarthy wrote. "DOJ should only exist if it's nonpartisan. Too dangerous to liberty otherwise."
"If AG Garland's office had posted this, MAGA & GOP would be calling for impeachment," McCarthy added, referring to Biden administration attorney general Merrick Garland.
Mark Rotert, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, agreed that Mizelle's post was "disgraceful."
"It never would have occurred to us to explore what the candidate's views were about the president, or what kind of job the president is doing," Rotert said. "Partisan politics were never considered a relevant or even an appropriate discussion point."