Three Out From Trump DOJ After Midterms Shellacking

Just one month ago, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division had a complaint: Washingtonian Magazine had failed to rank her highly enough on its “Most Powerful Women in Washington 2026” list.

“I’m in here folks. But it’s striking how heavily weighted the list is toward the left,” Harmeet Dhillon wrote on X.

Alas, 33 days have passed since then. The Washingtonian list has remained the same. But Dhillon is out: she resigned from the Justice Department, a move announced this week after massive GOP losses in the midterms.

She did so after destroying the DOJ’s Civil Rights Section, hijacking it away from its decades-old mission of fighting institutional racism and protecting minority rights. Instead, the section became devoted to advancing right-wing causes, including protecting the rights of white Americans. It successfully pressured universities into abandoning diversity policies, sued California and Alaska on the eve of the midterms, and racked up 27 straight losses in its efforts to obtain state voter rolls.

Dhillon is one of three senior DOJ officials who have resigned so far in the wake of Tuesday’s shellacking. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones and Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division John Eisenberg also announced that they’re leaving this week.

A DOJ spokeswoman initially declined to comment on the departures beyond statements that Attorney General Todd Blanche issued as news of the resignations emerged. A few hours later, the DOJ told TPM, “The Department’s mission is unchanged: enforce the law, combat crime, and protect the American people. The Department was lucky to have had those who have recently announced departures, all of whom contributed to making America safer.”

Resignations after midterm defeats are normal under any administration. But in this case, the Trump administration is a first in the extent to which it politicized the DOJ, bulldozing the wall between the president’s personal and partisan interests as a politician and federal prosecutors’ massive power to choose how to apply criminal laws. Whatever boundaries existed before are now gone; the DOJ has a task force dedicated towards pursuing the opposition, TPM first reported, and has seen an unprecedented number of political cases collapse in the courts.

Incoming Democrats in the House and the Senate have said that they will make oversight on abuses at the DOJ and at DHS a priority.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), widely expected to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee next year, told TPM in a statement that “some of the people who enabled some of his most dangerous abuses of power and illegal conduct at the Justice Department are running scared — and resigning.”

“Let Dhillon and every official in this administration be on notice: resignation does not excuse you in any way from your legal duty to answer for your conduct before Congress and the American people we represent,” he added. “Preserve all your records, destroy none of them and prepare to testify truthfully under oath.”

Eisenberg was a lower-profile member of the Justice Department. At the National Security Division, he oversaw investigations into leaks of classified information, espionage cases, terrorism, and more. Under his tenure, the DOJ began to charge protestors with material support for terrorism. It’s the first time in American history that these laws, expanded after 9/11, were used against domestic protesters, TPM first reported, though some former officials told TPM that the charges appeared to have been brought by local U.S. Attorneys’ Offices outside of the division’s supervision.

Reding Quiñones was overseeing the so-called “grand conspiracy” probe, which was based on the idea that the various investigations into Trump’s conduct during his first term — starting with the Russia investigation but continuing onwards — were components of a single conspiracy to thwart him that went broad and deep. He hired Joe DiGenova, a former prosecutor who represented a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch during Trump’s first impeachment, to oversee the investigation. And yet, even with the probe in the hands of an ally, the investigation went nowhere: DiGenova stepped down in September.

Some reports say that Reding Quiñones was sidelined after allowing the actual law enforcement portions of his office to wither, preferring to focus instead on political directives coming from the White House via Main Justice.

Some former prosecutors have told TPM that other U.S. Attorneys’ Offices have begun to separate political cases from the work of career prosecutors, with appointees, including the U.S. Attorneys and their first deputies, overseeing the former cases, which include voter fraud investigations, while career staff handle the latter.