The Justice Department’s pardon attorney was dismissed a day after she refused to recommend that the actor Mel Gibson, a prominent supporter of President Trump, should have his gun rights restored, according to the attorney and other sources. Elizabeth Oyer, the former pardon attorney, described the sequence of events as an alarming departure from longstanding practice, one that put public safety and the department’s integrity at risk. Gibson lost his gun rights as a result of a 2011 domestic violence misdemeanor conviction. “This is dangerous. This isn’t political — this is a safety issue,” Oyer told New York Times as she described the internal discussions about whether to give gun rights back to people with domestic violence convictions. Oyer was one of a number of high-ranking Justice Department officials who were fired on Friday, the latest moves by the Trump administration to remove or demote senior career lawyers who play critical roles in department decisions. A Justice Department official said the disagreement over Gibson played no role in the decision to dismiss Oyer. Two weeks ago, Oyer was put on a working group to restore gun rights to people convicted of crimes. That effort has been championed by some who maintain that not all people with criminal convictions are dangerous or deserving of such a ban. Others contend that doing so, particularly with people with domestic violence convictions, carries significant risks.
Trump has a history of making pardon decisions without substantial input from the pardon attorney, but in this case Justice Department leaders planned to make the decision about gun rights on their own. Federal law prohibits those convicted of crimes, including misdemeanor state domestic violence cases, from purchasing or owning a handgun. For decades, the law has technically given the Justice Department authority to restore gun ownership rights to specific individuals, but in practice that has not been done, in part because of significant limits imposed by Congress. Oyer was told that the working group would generate a list of candidates to get back their gun rights, as part of a longer-term effort to have the attorney general restore such rights to some individuals. Her office came up with an initial batch of 95 people she considered worthy of consideration, made up principally of people whose convictions were decades old, who had asked for the restriction to be lifted and for whom Oyer’s office thought the risk of recidivism was low. That list was given to the office of the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, which whittled the 95 candidates down to just nine. “They sent it back to me saying, ‘We would like you to add Mel Gibson to this memo’,” she said. Attached was a letter Gibson’s lawyer had written to senior Justice Department officials arguing for his gun rights to be restored, saying he had been taped for an appointment by Trump and had made big, successful movies, Trump said he had named Gibson and others “special ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California.”