Trump Justice Department attorney resignations, Digi Mart USA News: In less than a week, the Trump Justice Department has seen four high-profile resignations, amid a growing crisis for an administration that has relied heavily on prosecutions and has been embroiled in controversy.
Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal criminal lawyer who became the nation’s 96th attorney general in August, announced on Monday the resignation of Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Brett Shumate. The departure was effective immediately and was described as “abrupt and unexpected” by department sources speaking to CBS.
Speculation linked it to the promotion of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff, though this link was not confirmed.
Last week, the assistant attorneys general for the department’s national security and civil rights divisions also resigned. A key U.S.
attorney in Florida also left last week. None of the departing officials have spoken publicly.
Speculation has linked the departures to the Democrats’ surge in the midterm elections, which is expected to bring fresh congressional scrutiny of Trump’s attempts to use the Justice Department as a weapon against political adversaries.
These resignations are only the most visible part of a larger problem. More than 10,000 federal lawyers have left since Trump took office, and many positions were not filled.
The New York Times estimated in May that more than 10,000 lawyers had left the federal government since the start of 2025, roughly one in five. While many were replaced, departures continued to outpace hiring.
In November of last year, the American Bar Association Journal reported that the Justice Department “has lost thousands of experienced attorneys since the start of the Trump administration and has backfilled a fraction of the open jobs, with the process snarled by a lack of qualified candidates, bureaucratic delays and hiring freezes.” Observers say the loss of talent and experience is damaging the delivery and credibility of justice in the United States.
Many lawyers left on principled grounds, saying they were pressured to lead prosecutions or investigations they considered baseless or unethical. Officials who stayed were reportedly compared to the bureaucrats who followed orders in Nazi Germany.
The problem was compounded by an internal purge, led by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, of veteran prosecutors who had worked on cases viewed as anti-Trump. The purge has continued under Blanche, targeting lawyers who refuse to pursue cases the administration wants prosecuted for lack of evidence.
The department has also undermined its own recruiting. In 2025, a Trump appointee to the D.C.
Civil Division reportedly threatened Georgetown Law School with refusing to hire its graduates unless it ended its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the New Yorker reported.
Those who remain are struggling. An investigation last month by The Hill found that the exodus of veteran attorneys had greatly increased workloads in the civil division, in some cases almost doubling them, creating a cycle that leads to more resignations.
In February, in a federal district court in Minnesota during the height of the ICE immigration operation known as Metro Surge, attorney Julie Le, who had been deputized to work with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office, made a striking admission.
“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” she told the court. Her office had lost a wave of attorneys who did not want to prosecute anti-ICE protesters, following the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent.
According to one report, the office had lost almost half its staff. One source told Mother Jones, “We are down to a skeleton crew.”
District Judge Jerry Blackwell had complained of “so many issues with noncompliance” with court orders by government lawyers, including orders to release people held in ICE detention unlawfully. “The Government makes the point that some of the attorneys currently are under extraordinary strain,” Blackwell said.
“But what you cannot do is to detain first and then sort out lawful authority later.”
Le told the judge she had “stupidly” volunteered to help with the ICE caseload, had received no proper orientation or training, and had to threaten to quit to get senior colleagues to respond to queries. “What do you want me to do?
The system sucks. This job sucks.” She said she had sent an email in “big, bold font” to her superiors about her frustrations and had requested a transfer, but no one was willing to come to court to help improve the system.
Days later, Le was no longer working at the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Legal reporter Chris Geidner wrote in January that “the destruction done to the Department of Justice in the past year is hard to overstate.” The ABA Journal reported that the department once attracted some of the best graduates of the nation’s top law schools and firms but now has difficulty finding qualified candidates. Local U.S.
Attorney offices have resorted to emailing their networks seeking applicants. One former federal prosecutor compared the pitch to asking, “If you ever threw a pass, do you want to be a quarterback?” A law student told the Times after turning down a Justice Department internship that many people would look down on anyone who held a federal job begun during this administration.
John E. Jones, a retired federal judge and now president of Dickinson College, blamed Trump for a “massive reputational problem” at the department, saying the president “has had the attorneys general essentially do his bidding and prosecute his enemies.”
Judges are also taking notice, and it is changing how they treat the government. In January, District Judge Irene Berger ordered the release of a detainee arrested without a warrant by ICE at a traffic stop.
In her ruling, Berger wrote that “the presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country, and this Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [them].”
Judges claim that under administration pressure, prosecutors are starting to cut corners or even lie. In July, ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases in which judges criticized federal prosecutors’ actions since Trump’s re-election.
It found that judges increasingly could not rely on the presumption of regularity, the assumption that the government has done its job properly and in good faith. “Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” Jones told ProPublica.
“We’ve never seen anything close to this.”
In a scathing June editorial, former federal prosecutor James Zirin wrote: “Plagued by the lack of experienced prosecutors and infected by politicised charging decisions that went nowhere, the Justice Department has lost sight of its core mission to see that justice is done.”
