She Denied Mel Gibson a Gun—Then Trump’s DOJ Fired Her

Liz Oyer: Someone from the Department of Justice called me to give me a heads-up that there were two armed special deputy U.S. marshals on their way to my home to deliver me a letter, warning me against testifying before members of Congress. Al Letson: Coming up on More to the Story, Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer talks about feeling threatened by the Trump administration after she was asked to testify on Capitol Hill about losing her job. She says she was fired for refusing to restore gun rights to actor Mel Gibson. Don’t go anywhere. This is More to the Story. I’m Al Letson. Back in January as President Biden was leaving the Oval Office and President Trump was returning, the two men used the presidential pardon in sweeping historic ways. Biden preemptively pardoned individuals he believed could face retribution from an incoming Trump administration. Trump granted clemency to more than 1500 people convicted of crimes related to the January 6th insurrection. But in the shadows, sits a long backlog of thousands of other Americans also seeking clemency. For more than a century, the United States pardon attorney has advised presidents on which cases should get attention. Until recently, Liz Oyer was that attorney. Before her appointment in 2022, Liz was a long-time public defender. So for her becoming the country’s pardon attorney was a dream job, but that dream ended a couple of months ago after she was handed an unusual task. Liz, thanks so much for coming in. Liz Oyer: Thanks for having me. Great to be here Al. Al Letson: So in March, you were fired from your position as a U.S. pardon attorney. Can you talk to me about what happened? Liz Oyer: Well, I was a career employee of the Department of Justice, meaning I was not a political appointee and I fully expected to be able to continue my work into the Trump administration. I was successful in keeping my job for the first two months or so of the new administration, but I was fired very unexpectedly, very abruptly on March the 7th by the Deputy Attorney General. In the days leading up to my firing, I had been asked to essentially sign off on what was a political favor for a friend of the president. I was asked to make a recommendation to the Attorney General that she reinstate the right to possess a firearm of Mel Gibson, an actor who was a friend of the president and had been appointed by the president to be some sort of ambassador to Hollywood. That’s not something that was in the ordinary scope of my duties, nor is it something that I could do because I simply didn’t have enough information to conclude that Mr. Gibson is somebody who could safely own a firearm. He lost his right to possess a firearm under federal law after he was convicted of domestic violence and he was seeking to have that right reinstated by the Justice Department. So I was asked to make that recommendation to the Attorney General and I did not make that recommendation, and within a few hours, I was fired. Al Letson: And the way you were fired was pretty unprecedented. Can you lay that out? Liz Oyer: Well, I was fired in a three-sentence memo that stated I was terminated effective immediately under Article II of the Constitution. I was given no explanation for my firing, and in fact, I never actually met Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General who signed off on the letter firing me. Al Letson: You were invited to testify in early April at a Congressional hearing arranged by Democrats about Trump’s treatment of the DOJ. Liz Oyer: Yes, I was asked by members of Congress to testify before what was called a spotlight hearing. It was a hearing that was hosted by Democratic members of both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, and I was asked to testify about the circumstances of my firing. That testimony took place on April 7th, exactly a month after I was fired. Al Letson: And how did the administration take to the idea that you were going to be testifying? Liz Oyer: Well, the Friday night before my testimony, which was scheduled to take place on a Monday, I received a call from the Department of Justice advising me. And this was someone who I don’t think was supposed to be giving me this heads up. But someone from the Department of Justice called me to give me a heads-up that there were two armed special deputy U.S. marshals on their way to my home to deliver me a letter warning me against testifying before members of Congress. That happened late Friday night and I was eventually able to negotiate a resolution where those officers were called off and did not come to my home after I shared that my teenager was at home alone and that it would be very upsetting for my child to see these armed law enforcement officers show up at my home between 9 and 10 o’clock at night. Al Letson: I mean, do you feel like that was an intimidation tactic? Liz Oyer: It certainly was intended… Well, I don’t know what the intent was. It certainly felt like it was an attempt to display the power of the Department of Justice and to make me afraid of giving my testimony, to make me afraid of telling the truth about the circumstances leading up to my termination. Al Letson: And yet you still testified. Liz Oyer: I did. I felt like it was especially important after that incident that I show up and that I go forward with my testimony because I did not want to set the precedent that those types of tactics could be effective in chilling people from speaking the truth about what’s going on in the Department of Justice. Al Letson: Let’s hear a bit of your testimony. Liz Oyer: The letter was a warning to me about the risks of testifying here today, but I’m here because I will not be bullied into concealing the ongoing corruption and abuse of power at the Department of Justice. DOJ is entrusted with keeping us safe, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our civil rights. It is not a personal favor bank for the president. Its career employees are not the president’s personal debt collectors. Al Letson: You also talked about the attempt to intimidate you by sending armed marshals to your house. How did lawmakers react to that? Liz Oyer: I think everybody was shocked that the Department of Justice had gone to such lengths to prevent me from speaking the truth about my own experience and the circumstances leading up to my own firing. I haven’t had the opportunity to talk with others about how this felt to them, others who worked in the Department of Justice, but I can only imagine that other individuals who might be thinking about coming forward and speaking up against the abuses of power by this administration are deterred from doing so seeing the tactics that the leadership of the department are using to prevent people from speaking out. Al Letson: Coming up, Liz calls out the administration on her TikTok for squandering what she estimates is almost a billion dollars just from pardoning white-collar criminals. Liz Oyer: So Trump came into office and started pardoning people who owed tens of millions, and in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution to their victims, effectively wiping out those judgments and ensuring that those victims had no recourse to get that money back through the criminal process. Al Letson: But before we get to that, we are a couple of months into our new show and I am so happy you have come along for the ride. So I’m going to ask you for a favor. Tell your friends about us. Come on, make it Facebook official. We go together. While public media is under a threat, we are still here, reporting the stories that are important to you. And feel free to give us a rating and review and help others discover the award-winning reporting from Reveal. Okay, back in a moment with more Liz Oyer. This is More to the Story. I’m Al Letson and I’m talking with Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer. So Liz, let’s get into how the federal pardon system works. Okay, so the way I understand it, the President has the power to issue pardons. So what’s the role of the Department of Justice? Liz Oyer: The Constitution gives the president essentially unfettered discretion to grant clemency to whomever he chooses. But the role that the Department of Justice has historically played is to try to ensure that the clemency process is accessible to everyone and to make recommendations on behalf of members of the public that are consistent and uphold principles of justice. Al Letson: So what’s the process if somebody wants to apply for a pardon? Liz Oyer: Well, in normal times, there is an application process that is run through the Department of Justice. There are forms that are available to fill out to provide personal information that helps us to make an informed evaluation of whether you’re a good candidate for clemency. We distribute those forms widely among incarcerated people because about 80% of the population applying for clemency are people who are currently serving prison sentences. So those application forms are available throughout the Bureau of Prisons to people serving sentences and to the general public. You’d fill out the application, the application would be reviewed and investigated by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, and ultimately a recommendation would be prepared that would go to the president for his final decision. Al Letson: Yeah. So we’ve done some stories on pardons in the past, and my recollection from those stories is that the list of people who want a pardon is humongous. Liz Oyer: The list is quite long. The Department of Justice typically gets a few thousand applications per year, and depending on the pace of decisions by the president, those applications can start to pile up. When I became pardon attorney in April of 2022, there were over 18,000 applications pending, which means 18,000 people who were waiting for answers from the president about their applications. Al Letson: So the Trump administration comes in, and if anything, President Trump is a disruptor of federal systems. How did it change when President Trump came into office? Liz Oyer: Well, one thing that changed almost immediately is that the Office of the Pardon Attorney was sidelined in the process. Traditionally, the office would have several points of contact in the White House and we would be in close coordination to ensure that we were reviewing clemency applications in a way that was consistent with the president’s priorities and to ensure that the president had the ability to receive and review the applications that we were recommending. That broke down really pretty immediately when the change in administrations occurred and clemencies started being issued on day one but without any involvement from the Office of the Pardon Attorney. Al Letson: So since you were let go, you started a TikTok account named lawyer.oyer where you have really gone after the administration. And in one video you ran the numbers and said the federal government had lost out on recovering a huge amount of money by granting pardons for white-collar crimes. Tell me how that’s possible. Liz Oyer: The president has the ability to grant a couple of different types of clemency. One type that is commonly granted is a commutation of sentence, which is essentially a reduction of a sentence, and that can apply to any part of the sentence. So commutations are generally sought by people who are in prison and they’re seeking a reduction of their prison sentence. Another type of clemency that the president can grant is a full pardon. And a pardon essentially wipes away the conviction in all aspects of the sentence. It’s forgiveness from the president for a crime that one has been convicted of. Typically, pardons are reserved for people who have served their entire sentence. If they owed any money, they’ve generally paid back the money before they would be considered for a full pardon. And in normal times, pardons were reserved for a select few people who had really demonstrated good conduct since their conviction and paid their debt to society. When Trump came into office, he began granting full pardons to people who had not even served their sentence. And his pardons not only wiped out any sentence of imprisonment but also any financial penalties that were part of the sentence for the crime. That includes what’s called restitution, which is a mandatory part of a sentence for any financial crime that requires the person who’s convicted to pay back any money that is owed to victims of the crime. So Trump came into office and started pardoning people who owed tens of millions, and in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution to their victims, effectively wiping out those judgments and ensuring that those victims had no recourse to get that money back through the criminal process. Al Letson: So effectively they got to keep that money? Liz Oyer: Yes. There’s one individual who’s a good example of this. His name is Trevor Milton. He started a company called Nikola, which was supposedly going to build the world’s first electric-powered semi-truck, and his company turned out to be a massive fraud. But in the meantime, Milton had become a billionaire building this company and raising money from other people. Those people were out hundreds of millions of dollars. The Department of Justice was asking that Milton be ordered to repay his victims a total of almost $700 million. And before he had repaid a cent of that money, Trump swooped in and granted Milton a full pardon, which means that whatever money Milton earned he can keep and whatever money his victims lost is just gone. Al Letson: What was the morale like in your department as the lawyers who work on this stuff day in and day out are watching the Trump administration do whatever they want? Liz Oyer: Being cut out of the process entirely was very demoralizing for the staff of the office. We had a lot of cases in the pipeline of people who had been waiting their turn, people who had gone through the ordinary process, and people who had been fully vetted and recommended by the office for this type of relief. Those are people who lack political connections to the White House. They’re people who lack the money to hire lawyers and lobbyists to get their applications to the front of the line. And it just seemed massively unjust that people were jumping to the front of the line based on political connections and wealth that they were able to spend to get that special access. Al Letson: You’ve now been replaced by Ed Martin who was not only a Stop the Steal activist but defended January 6th insurrectionists in court. What do you know about him? Liz Oyer: Well, Ed Martin is someone who was initially nominated to serve as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. And his nomination failed because Republicans found that he was someone who had views that were so extreme that he was not qualified to serve in that role. He’s somebody who has closely affiliated himself ideologically with President Trump. And that is especially concerning in a role like pardon attorney because it has always been a non-political role. The position of pardon attorney is actually among a select few positions in the Department of Justice that has designated a career-reserved position, meaning that it cannot be filled by a political appointee. The idea is to ensure that the president is receiving neutral and non-political advice about the use of his clemency power, Ed Martin certainly is not the person who is going to deliver that type of advice. Al Letson: Yeah. He’s been saying that he’s going to re-examine the Biden preemptive pardons. What are your thoughts on that? Liz Oyer: Well, once a pardon is issued, it’s final. There’s no way to undo it, regardless of what we may think about its soundness in retrospect. The same goes for Trump’s pardons, Biden’s pardons, the pardons issued by any president. We could have conversations for days about whether the decision-making was good or bad, but the fact is that the pardons are final once they are issued. Al Letson: So let’s put it in stone. Presidential pardons are final. But if we’ve learned anything from the Trump administration, it’s that legal precedent often… I don’t know, it doesn’t hold a lot of weight with them. Should we be concerned that they might try and find a way to rescind President Biden’s pardons? Liz Oyer: I think that you’re right to be concerned about that. This administration has certainly shown that they don’t feel constrained by the typical norms, and they could certainly try to rescind pardons that have been issued. In that case, it would really be up to the courts to enforce the law. We’re relying on the courts in a whole lot of different domains to push back against overreach by the political administration and to ensure that our system of laws remains in force. And this is another area where if the administration tried to rescind pardons, the courts would really have to step in and declare the pardon is enforceable. Al Letson: What does all this say about how the Trump administration is running the DOJ? Liz Oyer: It’s always been the case that our system of justice strives for fairness and is imperfect. That’s something that I’ve seen up close as a public defender, the imperfections in the system of justice. But there have been some basic principles that have always guided us, even if in some cases they’ve been aspirational. In this administration, the leadership of the department seems to be walking away from some of those ideals and seems to be affirmatively embracing the idea that the benefits of government can be doled out in a way that is unequal and can be doled out in a way that favors political friends and allies. And on the flip side of that is that the powers of government can be used against people who are not politically aligned with the administration. Those have been things that have always across parties… There’s always been some agreement that those are not good things, but this administration seems to be embracing those as acceptable ways of doing business, which is very deeply concerning. Al Letson: As someone who’s worked in the legal system for years, what’s next for you? How do you push back against an administration and a Justice Department that many would say are abusing its power? Liz Oyer: From my perspective, all I can do is to speak up about what I’m seeing and sound the alarm about the things that I’m finding concerning. There are a lot of things going on right now, and it’s hard for us to keep up with all of the things that this administration is doing that should cause us concern. So I’m trying to focus on what’s happening with pardons, what’s happening inside the Department of Justice, and use my voice to educate others who may not be lawyers about why those issues should concern them and to try to find ways to shed light on some of the things that are happening behind the scenes in our justice system that are very damaging and destructive. Al Letson: Liz Oyer, thank you so much for coming in and talking to me today. Liz Oyer: Thanks for having me. Al Letson: That was Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer. You can find her on TikTok @lawyer.oyer. That’s O-Y-E-R. We reached out to the Department of Justice for comment on Liz’s firing and received this statement from the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Without hearing our interview, the statement called her allegations about her firing erroneous and said her decision to voice those allegations is, quote, “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.” If you want to learn more about the U.S. pardon system, check out our Reveal episode, All the President’s Pardons, where we look at the politics of clemency and hear an interview with Former President Gerald Ford about his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon. Lastly, just a reminder that we are listener-supported. That means listeners like you. You can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to revealnews.org/gift. Again, that’s revealnews.org/gift. And thank you. This episode was produced by Josh Sanburn and Kara McGuirk-Allison. The theme music and engineering helped by Fernando, my man, yo Arruda, and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson, and let’s do this again next week. This is More to the Story.