Julia Haller worked with the since-indicted Sidney Powell to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election in what a federal judge called a “historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”
Now, she’s a staff attorney at the Justice Department.
Haller works in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, an office currently threatening top election officials with criminal prosecution if noncitizens vote this November.
She’s part of a divisional transformation that current and former staff tell NOTUS is causing deep tension within the office, which was established via the 1957 Civil Rights Act and traditionally tasked with enforcing a wide swath of laws that prohibit various forms of discrimination.
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The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has seen dramatic changes since President Donald Trump came back into office last year and installed Harmeet Dhillon, a former Republican Party operative in California, to lead it.
Dhillon has fired employees in droves, pushed out others through separation incentives tied to pressure campaigns, reassigned staff and rewritten the mission statements for each section in the division. She has vastly reshaped the types of cases the office pursues to include constraining voting access, reducing punishments for allegedly abusive police officers and expanding Second Amendment rights.
“It’s been a radical shift,” said one civil rights attorney who just recently left the department.
Haller’s hiring earlier this year came after a federal judge in Michigan sanctioned her and her colleagues, including Powell, for one of their lawsuits, requiring them to pay attorney fees incurred by the state and the city of Detroit and sending them to 12 hours of continuing legal education courses. An appeals court largely held up the ruling and the Supreme Court subsequently declined to intervene.
In addition to Michigan, Haller and her co-counsels had brought lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin challenging Joe Biden’s victories there. All of those efforts were unsuccessful, with judges finding the suits were rooted in baseless theories and conjecture, “gossip and innuendo” and even invented quotes.
The District of Columbia Bar brought charges against Haller in 2024. That case is still pending, though Haller has expressed remorse. Haller is currently representing the government in federal court in a case challenging Alabama’s treatment of prisoners, though she risks having her law license suspended if the bar association rules against her.
The current and former workers said Dhillon is recruiting attorneys, like Haller, who support her effort to reshape the work of the office. Last week, Dhillon announced the onboarding of more than 100 new attorneys and staff in the civil rights office, which followed significant hiring and has continued with ongoing job posts.
“We have new hires that have no idea what they’re doing or anything about the substantive law,” said one attorney currently in the civil rights office. They added that the new employees have a “sense of superiority” and have told existing staff they “have no idea what they’re doing.”
“Now it just seems like you need to not be a Democrat to get hired and you can fall into the job and fumble around,” the current attorney said. “They got rid of everyone they wanted to get rid of and now filling with sycophants.”
In a statement to NOTUS, Dhillon said she looks forward to hiring another 100 new personnel in addition to those already announced, and blamed previous staff, many of whom accepted separation incentives under threat of layoffs, for the high turnover.
“Last year, many career employees abandoned their posts for a six-figure payout,” Dhillon said, adding that since then, the office “has grown steadily, with only a few departures due to retirements or typical circumstances for a department of our size. Any claim to the contrary regarding turnovers is misleading and dishonest.”
Ejaz Baluch joined the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division as career attorney in Trump’s first term, but left last year after being reassigned from the employment law section to an office responsible for processing internal human resources complaints. His former colleagues are now clashing with recent hires.
“They’re not familiar with these laws, with the statutes, with civil rights enforcement,” Baluch said. “They’re being hired because they have a certain political ideology and a worldview.”
Baluch noted there are conflicts between new and old staff over which cases to pursue. The recent hires bristle at their more tenured coworkers when they say there is no legal or investigatory basis to pursue certain cases.
Regan Rush, who led the office’s special litigation section when she left in May of last year, said new hires will also lack institutional knowledge and experience.
“That’s simply irreplaceable,” Rush said.
The office has dropped several cases against police departments it was investigating or had already sued over alleged discriminatory hiring practices toward Black candidates. Part of the stated reason for those decisions, Baluch said, was that the cases improperly relied on demographic statistics. The civil rights office subsequently brought cases against Harvard University and the University of California, Davis, over admissions practices, however, which also depended on demographic statistics.
“This shows that it’s less about actual evidence and more about who these cases are about,” Baluch said. “They are alleging it’s discrimination against white applicants. All the cases we had before were discrimination against Black applicants.”
The Civil Rights Division has similarly shut down or withdrawn its support for cases involving alleged police misconduct and requested lowering sentences for convicted officers, lending discrimination, unlawfully drawn congressional districts and individuals restricting access to abortion clinics, among many others.
New priorities have included cracking down on alleged antisemitism on college campuses and restricting opportunities for transgender individuals. It has used laws passed in the wake of Rodney King’s violent beating seeking to address jurisdictions with a “pattern or practice” of law enforcement misconduct to instead challenge cities restricting gun rights. It has leveraged the 1960 Civil Rights Act and subsequent laws aimed at expanding voting rights to attempt, unsuccessfully, to gain access to several states’ lists of eligible voters.
Rush said her former office is engaging in “an unprecedented perversion of those statutes” by using the laws in ways Congress had never intended. Through that approach, the civil rights office’s leadership has made clear to new hires that they will be asked to take the division in a new direction.
“When that is the environment, where the expectation is set along those lines and reinforced from leadership every day, that is an obvious expectation of anyone who is hired into the organization,” she said.
Dhillon denied that new hires face any political screening.
“Career attorneys conduct ranking, interviews, and hiring recommendations for new career attorneys, utilizing background checks, qualification criteria, and suitability screenings to ensure the selection of the most qualified candidates,” she said.
The DOJ is continuing to exert control by reassigning staff and firing career workers hired under the previous administration before their full civil service protections take effect, according to a current and several former employees familiar with ongoing practices.
“They’re moving folks from one section to another in the hopes that they won’t want to stay once they’ve been moved,” said the attorney who recently left the division.
The approach has left employees afraid to speak out or push back despite ethical concerns.
“That’s a power they continue to have,” Baluch said. “If someone is being too much of a squeaky wheel, they’re at risk of being reassigned or terminated.”
The current attorney noted that government-wide changes the Trump administration has implemented, including a condensed disciplinary schedule that makes it easier to fire career staff, have also had a chilling effect on the workforce.
In a social media post announcing the 100-plus recent hires, Dhillon called the new staff “civil rights warriors” who will enforce laws to benefit all Americans and “not just a select few.” In practice, Rush said, Dhillon has made clear since her first day in office that DOJ lawyers were meant to tackle Trump’s personal grievances.
“That is a profound shift of how this department operated post-Watergate,” she said.
Baluch suggested the turnover will have long-lasting effects on the judicial system.
“That will mean there are less and less people in the division standing up for the rule of law,” he said. “As a country, we all lose as a result.”
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