Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said Tuesday that he will not prosecute former Justice Department officials who illegally applied political criteria to the hiring of career department personnel.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee quickly criticized Mukasey’s position.

According to an internal Justice Department report released in July, former department officials Monica Goodling and Jan Williams, who served as White House liaisons, and former department chief of staff Kyle Sampson violated both federal law and the department’s own hiring policy in applying political and ideological criteria to candidates for immigration judgeships within the department. The report also found that Goodling improperly weighed political considerations when considering applicants for other career department positions.

Another department report, issued in June, found evidence of politicized hiring in the department’s Honors Program and its Summer Law Internship Program.

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

The attorney general’s stance is consistent with other decisions he has made, since assuming his office last November, not to prosecute allegations of illegality by current and former administration officials.

In February, Mukasey refused to follow federal law and refer a House contempt citation against White House chief of staff Joshua B. Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers to a grand jury. Mukasey said he would not act in the matter because President Bush had invoked executive privilege in ordering Bolten and Miers not to comply with House Judiciary Committee subpoenas.

Mukasey has also declined to examine allegations that the U.S. government has tortured detainees held at military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba, because government officials acted under legal guidance from the Justice Department.

But Mukasey’s position is not sitting well with leading Senate Democrats.

“The attorney general, the nation’s top law enforcement officer, seems intent on insulating this administration from accountability,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., said.

The June and July reports are the products of internal investigations of Justice Department hiring decisions and procedures sparked by a congressional probe into the firing of several U.S. attorneys in 2006. That controversy led to the resignation of Mukasey’s predecessor, Alberto R. Gonzales, last year.

Department officials are expected to release two more reports in the coming months, on alleged political interference in the Civil Rights Division and on the federal prosecutor firings themselves, that could potentially be even more explosive.

In his speech, Mukasey touted the steps he has taken to crack down on the alleged politicization of the Justice Department. He said his decision not to prosecute the former officials “does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences. Far from it. The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity.”

New York Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer said he plans to introduce legislation “to make what (the former officials) did a misdemeanor so that in the future, those who violate the civil service laws cannot escape unscathed.”

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., announced last month that he had asked his staff to review the July report and decide whether to recommend a criminal referral for perjury.