WASHINGTON - Less than three months after registering as a lobbyist, former Attorney General John Ashcroft has banked at least $269,000 from just four clients and appears to be developing a practice centered on firms that want to capitalize on a government demand for homeland security technology that boomed under sometimes controversial policies he promoted while in office.

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The office of the attorney general, along with the secretaries of state, defense and treasury, is among the oldest and most prestigious in the president’s Cabinet.

"One would have thought that a former attorney general wouldn’t be doing that," said John Schmidt, a former associate attorney general in the Clinton administration, who is now a lawyer at Mayer Brown.

"To take the kind of prestige and stature of the attorney general" and lobby ..., "it seems a little demeaning of the office, honestly," he said.

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As attorney general, Ashcroft sued Oracle in 2004 to try to block an earlier acquisition by the company.

Before the attacks, "there hadn’t really been the commercial opportunities in the justice department. There hadn’t been a lot of call for lobbying," said Elizabeth Garrett, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a member of President George W. Bush’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform.

Since the attacks, however, the justice department has become a key clearinghouse for huge homeland security-related contracts. "That’s big bucks," Garrett said.

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And the totals that Ashcroft has reported so far represent in some cases only initial retainers or billings.

In year-end filings, Ashcroft’s firm, The Ashcroft Group LLC, reported collecting $269,000, including $220,000 from Oracle Corp., which won justice department approval of a multibillion acquisition less than a month after hiring Ashcroft in October.

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Ashcroft’s clients also include ChoicePoint, a data broker that sells credit reports and other personal information to the FBI and other federal agencies, and LTU Technologies Inc., a Washington and Paris-based maker of software for analyzing large batches of video and other visual images.

The Ashcroft Group reported payments of $15,000 from ChoicePoint, and $20,000 from Israel Aircraft Industries.