Fired Justice Dept. official speaks out on her ouster and Mel Gibson

by Perry Stein (c) 2025 , The Washington Post


A senior Justice Department attorney who was fired Friday afternoon gave an extraordinary series of interviews this week, saying she was ousted after refusing to back restoring gun ownership rights to actor Mel Gibson, a supporter of President Donald Trump who was convicted on misdemeanor domestic violence charges in 2011.

Elizabeth Oyer – whose responsibilities as Justice Department pardon attorney included working with the president to determine who should be granted clemency – described a culture at the department in which the advice of longtime career officials is ignored and everyone is expected to agree with Trump and his allies.

“Dissent within the Department of Justice is just being aggressively silenced,” Oyer said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday evening. “When I came into work Friday morning, I said to a colleague, ‘I really think that Mel Gibson may be my downfall.’”

The Justice Department has denied her description of events, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche saying in a statement that “former employees who violate their ethical duties by making false accusations on press tours will not be tolerated.”

“This former employee’s version of events is false,” Blanche’s statement said. “Her decision to voice this erroneous accusation about her dismissal is in direct violation of her ethical duties as an attorney and is a shameful distraction from our critical mission to prosecute violent crime, enforce our nation’s immigration laws, and make America safe again.”

Oyer was one of several senior career officials at the department who were removed from their positions Friday afternoon – the latest wave of experienced lawyers pushed out by the Trump administration. No other fired official has spoken so openly about their ouster. Potentially, the removals would allow the president to put people aligned ideologically with his administration into the traditionally nonpartisan positions.

Oyer has said in multiple interviews that she was not given a reason for her firing.

But she told the New York Times, and said in later television interviews, that she had recently been assigned to a department working group looking to restore gun rights to some people who had committed crimes. The restoration of these rights is a priority of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Oyer said.

Oyer said her office was asked to identify suitable candidates. She sifted through people who had applied for pardons and whom her office had already vetted, then crafted a list of 95 individuals who had committed relatively nonviolent crimes at least 20 years ago and had demonstrated exemplary conduct since serving their sentences.

Justice Department leaders whittled that list down to nine people, Oyer said, and she was asked to send a memo to Bondi explaining why those people should have their gun rights restored.

“I was comfortable doing that with those cases because I had a great deal of information on those nine people and had already recommended that they were suitable candidates for a presidential pardon,” Oyer told MSNBC.

But after Oyer drafted the memo, she was asked to add Gibson to the list. She said that Gibson had not applied for a pardon or been vetted through her office, and that she did not believe that the actor, as someone with a history of domestic, met the criteria to have his gun rights restored.

Oyer said she was escorted from her office by security hours after she refused to add Gibson’s name.

“My ethical duty as a Department of Justice employee – and now a former one – is to the laws of the United States and the people that I was entrusted to serve,” Oyer told MSNBC. “It is not to the bullies who are currently running the Department of Justice.”

The department last week transferred at least three senior officials out of the highly sensitive National Security Division, which works with the FBI and other intelligence agencies to protect the nation from threats.

It is unclear whether the national security officials were provided a reason for their removals. They were technically not fired, with at least some of them being transferred to other parts of the Justice Department in less desirable positions, according to people familiar with the transfers.

The officials must now decide if they will accept those new assignments or resign.

In Oyer’s case, department officials cited Article II of the Constitution to justify her removal in her termination notice, which she posted online.

The Trump administration has cited this constitutional provision that establishes the powers of the executive branch in other termination notices as well, even though some federal workforce experts say it does not legally justify the removals of career employees.