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Not With a Bang, But a Whimper: Officials Leave the Justice Department Joyce Vance Nov 9 T.S. Eliot’s famous line from “The Hollow Men” has lived in my head a lot during the two Trump administrations. “This is the way the world ends,” he wrote, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” It epitomizes so much of what has happened to us over the last 10 years. Increasingly, I’d been thinking that was how it would end too—not with a moment of national awakening, but just a slow death. Then last Tuesday happened; Americans woke up and told Trump, “No more!” Trump, unsurprisingly, doesn’t seem to be listening. But some of the most high-ranking officials at the Justice Department are. Four of them have announced their resignations in just the last week. By comparison, Biden’s key Justice Department officials remained in place after the midterms, with the first two resignations not taking place until late 2023 and early 2024. No Biden-appointed U.S. Attorneys appear to have resigned in the two months following the midterm election. Trump is now a weak, lame-duck president. But the close-in-time resignations from key DOJ officials look to be about more than that. We don’t know their motives for certain. Sometimes people leave for new opportunities or for family reasons. But with each of these four, their departures may tell us something of significance about the Trump administration and the possibility that these individuals, at least, want to go out with a whimper instead of a big bang in the glare of the public spotlight. Brett Shumate will step down as the Assistant Attorney General (AAG) for DOJ’s Civil Division. He was nominated on March 3, 2025, and confirmed three months later, on June 9, 2025. The Civil AAG is in charge of federal civil litigation. It litigates on behalf of the United States and defends the government when it gets sued. Shumate’s name was on the signature line, and he appeared in court to defend some of the most expansive positions the Trump DOJ has taken with regard to executive power, including cases where the government clashed with the judiciary. Recently, he appeared in court to defend the government’s position that Judge Boasberg can’t conduct a contempt investigation in the CECOT prison deportation case. He also argued the National Guard case where DOJ took the position that Trump’s decision to federalize the National Guard could not be reviewed by the courts. Despite that work, CBS News reported today that a source “familiar with the matter” told CBS News that newly designated White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “has been critical of Shumate in the past and believes he is not aggressive enough, and this was a factor in Shumate's decision to step down.” Shumate's job is to make the calls in the Department’s most complex civil litigation. Stephen Miller is not even a lawyer. The fact that the positions Shumate was willing to take were not enough to satisfy Miller, and that Shumate considered Miller’s influence in deciding to leave, does not bode well. John Eisenberg was the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division. He was nominated on March 10, 2025, and confirmed on June 5, 2025. Bloomberg reports that Todd Blanche forced Eisenberg out after he resisted taking steps to compel journalists to reveal confidential sources in the context of investigations into leaks to the press. The reporting says that this was not a voluntary resignation and that Eisenberg was ordered to resign. This was not merely a disagreement about investigative tactics; it was about silencing reporters who were critical of the president, including an instance where “Blanche and his team pressured Eisenberg to approve the highly unusual and aggressive tack of subpoenaing reporters to divulge sources providing sensitive information — including the New York Times reporters who wrote about security problems with the president’s Qatari-donated jet.” Harmeet Dhillon was the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. She was nominated by Trump in December 2024 and confirmed by the Senate on April 3, 2025. On her watch, the Division morphed from the Justice Department’s crown jewel into a political weapon that could be deployed against the president’s enemies, Democrats, and voters. Hundreds of career people left as she abandoned their mission. Her new priorities for the Division included prosecuting voters instead of protecting them. In her resignation letter, she wrote that during her tenure, “We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI.” Her Obama administration predecessor in the role, Vanita Gupta, told The Washington Post that Dhillon “used the Civil Rights Division against the very communities and values it was founded to protect.” There is some suggestion Dhillon left after coming out on the wrong end of some palace intrigue and that there were disputes over election strategy. Whatever motivated her, no Justice Department employee—and especially not the head of the Civil Rights Division who is charged with protecting the right to vote—should be involved in playing politics with it. It’s more confirmation of how low this administration has fallen. Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, is leaving DOJ, as did special prosecutor Joe diGenova, after Washington tried to “force their hands” in the “grand conspiracy” case, a fanciful effort to tie all of Trump’s enemies up in one neat package. Reporting for NBC characterized it like this: the investigation “sought to tie actions dating back to the 2016 campaign to the more recent Jack Smith investigation, which led to now-dismissed charges against Trump over seeking to overturn his 2020 election loss as well as his handling of classified documents found during a 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago. Trump denied the charges.” Allegations of impropriety in the investigation have also surfaced, including a lawsuit filed by former CIA Director John Brennan, reportedly one of the targets, alleging that any resulting charges—so far none have been filed—would be subject to dismissal as a selective and vindictive prosecution. Quiñones is one of the defendants. Not all investigations pan out. Even setting aside for the moment that this one appears to be part of Trump’s revenge docket, once the prosecutors conducting it decide there isn’t enough evidence to move forward, any effort by DOJ’s political leadership to manipulate it to serve the president’s whims is an appalling abuse of the power of the prosecutor. Even though there have been no charges to date here, the resignations are deeply disturbing. Quiñones was nominated on March 10, 2025, and confirmed on August 2, 2025. Presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed positions are not easy to come by. A prospective nominee has to secure the president’s backing—no small feat given the fierce competition for these jobs—and then win Senate confirmation. It takes time; often, the process begins months before a nomination is actually made, and there is an expectation that nominees will serve for longer than the approximately 18 months each of these nominees lasted. They were confirmed early in the administration, when the process is usually easier. Securing confirmation for replacement nominees can become more difficult as an administration progresses, and that will undoubtedly be the case here, especially after the new Senate takes over in January. Here we have four senior DOJ officials heading for the exits after barely a year and a half on the job. This is the sort of turnover that raises a serious question: What’s going on inside the Justice Department? Unfortunately, we all know the answer. These four have left. But they can still be called upon to testify. And their resignation stories only buttress what I wrote to you last night: that Todd Blanche “should be impeached as soon as possible if he won’t resign.” The day after the election, I explained how Blanche’s election-day conduct—sending out target letters to an election lawyer and others—combined with his debauched approach to running the Justice Department demand that he be impeached and removed. There is no path forward with Blanche still at the helm of the Justice Department. Blanche has made a mockery of Justice. These resignations, each in their own way, underscore that fact. Blanche must be impeached if the rule of law is going to be restored. The Justice Department is supposed to protect the rule of law, not serve the president’s personal interests. Understanding what’s happening inside it—and what we can do about it—has never been more important. That’s why I write Civil Discourse. If you value independent legal analysis that connects the dots and helps us find a way forward, I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber. We’re in this together, Joyce