Mr Ashcroft, a devout Christian and a grittily determined singer, went public with one of his works last month, when he surprised an audience at a North Carolina seminary with a rendition of Let the Eagle Soar, a tribute to America's virtues, which continues: "Like she's never soared before, from rocky coast to golden shore, let the mighty eagle soar," and so on for four minutes.

The performance (which can be seen and heard at cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/ashcroft.sings.wbtv.med.html) was accompanied only by taped music, but Mr Ashcroft's staff are complaining that printed versions of the song are being distributed at meetings so that they will be able to join in.

When asked why she opposed the workplace singalong, one of the department's lawyers said: "Have you heard the song? It really sucks."

A group of Hispanic justice department employees were recently summoned to see the attorney general, and went along hoping that their boss might be making a special effort to promote diversity in the department's higher ranks.

Instead, they were asked to provide a hasty Spanish lesson to give the secretary a few phrases to use on a foreign delegation the next day. The Hispanic staff were then handed printed copies of Let the Eagle Soar and asked for volunteers to translate it.

This is not the first time Mr Ashcroft's subordinates have realised that this attorney general is unlike ordinary politicians. Each time he has been sworn in to political office, he is anointed with cooking oil (in the manner of King David, as he points out in his memoirs Lessons from a Father to His Son).

When Mr Ashcroft was in the Senate, the duty was performed by his father, a senior minister in a church specialising in speaking in tongues, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. When he became attorney general, Clarence Thomas, a supreme court justice, did the honours.

In January, a pair of 12ft statues in the atrium of a justice department building were covered by a blue curtain, on orders from Mr Ashcroft's office because the female figure Spirit of Justice was bare-breasted, and the body of her male partner, Majesty of Law, was not sufficiently covered by his toga.

The cover-up has provoked an anti-Ashcroft campaign by the singer and film star Cher, who has toured the media circuit denouncing his puritanism. She asked the Washington Post: "What are we going to do next? Put shorts on the statue of David, put an 1880s bathing suit on Venus Rising and a shirt on the Venus de Milo?"

Perhaps the most bizarre wrinkle in the Ashcroft enigma emerged in November when Andrew Tobias, the Democratic Party treasurer and a financial writer, published an article on his website accusing the attorney general of harbouring superstitions about tabby cats.

According to the Tobias article, advance teams for an Ashcroft visit to the US embassy in the Hague asked anxiously if there were tabby cats (or calico cats as they are known in the US) on the premises.

"Their boss, they explained, believes calico cats are signs of the devil," Mr Tobias reported.