Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Justice Department won't prosecute former officials who discriminated against jobseekers based on their political leanings and will encourage applicants who weren't hired to reapply, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said.

Internal department watchdogs have issued two audits concluding that several former officials broke civil laws by vetting interns, young lawyers and immigration judges on their conservative credentials and loyalty to President George W. Bush. The posts are meant to be non-political.

``Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,'' Mukasey said in a speech today to the American Bar Association in New York. ``In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws.''

Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, a co-author of both reports, told Congress last month that the former aides could be sanctioned by bar associations but that his staff had determined there wasn't evidence to justify any criminal charges.

The improper hiring took place mainly under Mukasey's predecessor, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who resigned under pressure after a separate scandal involving the 2006 firing of nine U.S. attorneys. Gonzales was generally unaware of the conduct of subordinates in the job application case, according to a report issued last month by Fine and the department's ethics chief.

Mukasey has called the violations disturbing and instituted changes for selecting young lawyers, interns and immigration judges, including screening them by career officials. He has also required political appointees to take training on personnel practices.

Reaching Out

In today's speech, Mukasey said the agency is reaching out to candidates ``who may have been improperly eliminated from consideration.'' They include recent law school graduates who applied for the Attorney General's Honors Program and current department lawyers who had sought temporary positions at the department's Washington headquarters.

``Each of them will be assured a fair evaluation,'' Mukasey said.

While some lawmakers have called for the department to fire any officials who were hired illegally, Mukasey said he wouldn't do that either.

``There is a principle of equity that we all learned in the schoolyard, and that remains as true today as when we first heard it: Two wrongs do not make a right,'' he said. It would be ``unfair, and quite possibly illegal given their civil service protections, to fire them or to reassign them without individual cause.''

The internal investigators are planning on issuing two more reports this year assessing politicization in the Justice Department's civil rights division and the U.S. attorney firings. Mukasey didn't address the possibility of prosecutions arising from those probes.

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Schmidt in Washington at rschmidt5@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 12, 2008 13:44 EDT