They wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Wednesday voicing outrage at a downsized request on penalties for the industry. The critics told Gonzales the Justice Department should not enter a settlement at this time based on "the unreasonably weak demands made by the government."

"Such a settlement would be contrary to the goal of exposing the tobacco companies' past misconduct and preventing future misconduct by the industry," the lawmakers wrote.

Political Interference?

At the prompting of a smaller group of Democratic lawmakers, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility this week agreed to investigate whether political interference factored into a decision to shrink from roughly $130 billion to $10 billion the size of a smoking cessation program.

The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that senior Justice officials overruled government prosecutors and ordered them to slash the penalties sought against the industry.

As the nearly nine-month trial closed last week, government lawyers asked US District Judge Gladys Kessler to require tobacco companies to pay for a $10 billion, five-year stop-smoking program.

One of the government's own witnesses had proposed a 25-year nationwide cessation program that would have cost the industry $130 billion.

'Based on the Merits'

In the May 30 memo to Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum, prosecutors Sharon Y. Eubanks and Stephen D. Brody cautioned that politics would be seen as the motivation for the reduction and warned that the smaller penalty would weaken the government's position in any settlement talks, the Times reported in its Thursday editions.

Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden would not comment on the report. "The government made a decision to offer an argument that was based on the merits of the case and that would be sustainable on appeal," he said.

Justice Department officials said the revised penalty was necessary to meet the standards of the civil racketeering law under which the case was filed in 1999.

An appeals court in February had barred the government from seeking $280 billion in allegedly ill-gotten tobacco profits. The lawmakers' letter also urged Gonzales to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court.