The DOJ Whistleblower They Tried to Silence

Liz Oyer glanced at her notes. “I see only Democratic members here today,” she said into the microphone. “But this is not a partisan issue.”

“I am here because I will not be bullied into concealing the ongoing corruption and abuse of power at the Department of Justice. The DOJ is entrusted with keeping us safe, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our civil rights.”

The Congressional hearing room was quiet.

“It is not a personal favor bank for the president. Its career employees are not the president’s personal debt collectors.”

Oyer had been abruptly fired from the Department of Justice not long before, the day after refusing to write a memo restoring the gun rights of actor Mel Gibson. Gibson was appointed a “Special Ambassador” to Hollywood by President Trump, despite having pleaded no contest to a domestic battery charge for assaulting his girlfriend in 2011. His girlfriend reported that Gibson hit her while she was holding their baby, breaking her teeth and blackening her eye.

It has been federal law since 1968 that people convicted of domestic violence be banned from owning guns.

Oyer said that her superior at the DOJ wanted to restore Gibson’s gun rights because of Gibson’s “personal relationship” with the president. (The DOJ disputes that Oyer was terminated because of her refusal to write the memo, but it has now become the official policy of the DOJ that any lawyer who “refuses to advance” the arguments of the administration will be “subject to to discipline and potentially termination.”)

This decision to restore Gibson’s gun rights runs counter to the ethical commitments all employees of the executive branch must abide by, which say: “Employees shall act impartially and not give preferential treatment to any private organization or individual.”

When Oyer went public with her story, the DOJ tried to intimidate her into silence, mobilizing armed federal marshals to go to her home and deliver a warning about testifying before Congress. “I was in the car with my husband and my parents … when I got the news that the officers were on their way to my house where my teenage child was home alone,” Oyer said.

“Fortunately, due to the grace of a very decent person who understood how upsetting this would be to my family, I was able to confirm receipt of the letter to an email address, and the deputies were called off.”

Oyer’s attorney, Michael Bromwich, said in a letter that, “This highly unusual step of directing armed law enforcement officers to the home of a former Department of Justice employee who has engaged in no misconduct, let alone criminal conduct, simply to deliver a letter, is both unprecedented and completely inappropriate. You appear to be using the Department’s security resources to intimidate a former employee who is engaged in statutorily protected whistleblower conduct, an act that implicates criminal and civil statutes as well as Department policy and your ethical obligations as a member of the bar.”

Federal ethical standards also require employees to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, and say that “public service is a public trust.”

When Trump took office, he kept a campaign promise and pardoned people convicted of crimes related to the Capitol attack. The Constitution establishes and protects a president’s pardon power, but pardoning does not mean the crime never occurred. In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that accepting a pardon is akin to admitting guilt.

On Jan 6, 2021, Stacy Wade Hager illegally entered the US Capitol building. He later wrote about it in detail on his Facebook page, saying that, “we opted to scale the wall,” and that once he had made it inside, “that was the first time I felt invincible.” He took multiple images of himself inside the Capitol, and security cameras confirmed his presence.

Hager was convicted of four counts, ordered to pay $570 in restitution toward repairing the Capitol, and then several years later, while his case was being appealed, he was pardoned.

Now, Hager wants his money back, and the DOJ thinks he should get it.

The filing asking for the return of his money comes after US Attorney Ed Martin — the top prosecutor in DC under the Trump administration — said that January 6 defendants deserve “reparations” for how they’ve been treated by the government. “I believe that everyone who has been targeted on January 6, they should get a pot of money, like the asbestos money that we got for victims of asbestos,” Martin said during a podcast in January.

The notion that people who committed actual crimes are entitled to their restitution money back, or that reparations are in order for the perpetrators of January 6, stands in stark contrast to how the DOJ is sending legal residents of the United States to a megaprison in El Salvador, despite the fact that some have never even been accused of a crime, let alone convicted of one. A recent investigation by CBS found that 75% of the migrants deported to El Salvador have no obvious criminal records.

Late last week, the federal government blew past the deadlines set by the courts to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States, the Maryland man who was mistakenly sent to CECOT in El Salvador. (I recently wrote more about this case, here.) The Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to bring back Abrego Garcia, but on Friday, Judge Paula Xinis said that the federal government was making “no meaningful attempts to comply” with the orders.

This much is clear: a justice system in which the government ignores the rule of law when convenient, attempts to intimidate whistleblowers into silence, all while pretending as though criminals with the “correct” political stances are instead victims, is not one that is fair, ethical, or just.

“It should alarm all Americans that the leadership of the Department of Justice appears to value political loyalty above the fair and responsible administration of justice,” Oyer said at her Congressional hearing.

“It should offend all Americans that our leaders are treating public servants with a lack of basic decency and humanity.”