Just a month ago, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division filed a complaint that Washingtonian Magazine had not ranked her high enough on its list of “Washington’s Most Influential Women of 2026.”
“I’m here folks. But it’s striking how heavily left-leaning the list is,” Harmeet Dhillon wrote on X.
Sadly, 33 days have passed since then. The Washingtonian list 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 civil rights section of the Justice Department, distracting it from its decades-old mission: combating institutional racism and protecting minority rights. Instead, the section devoted itself to advancing right-wing causes, including protecting the rights of white Americans. He successfully pressured universities to abandon diversity policies, sued California and Alaska on the eve of the midterm elections, and recorded 27 consecutive defeats in his efforts to secure state voter rolls.
Dhillon is one of three senior DOJ officials who have resigned so far in the wake of Tuesday’s bombings. 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 their departures this week.
A Justice Department spokeswoman initially declined to comment on the departures beyond statements released by Attorney General Todd Blanche when the resignations were announced. Hours later, the DOJ told TPM: “The Department’s mission remains unchanged: to enforce the law, fight crime, and protect the American people. The Department has been fortunate to have those who recently announced departures, all of whom have 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 that it has politicized the DOJ, bulldozing the wall between the president’s personal, partisan interests as a politician and the massive power of federal prosecutors to choose how to enforce criminal laws. The boundaries that existed before have now disappeared; The DOJ has a task force dedicated to prosecuting opposition, TPM first reported, and has seen an unprecedented number of political cases fail in court.
New Democrats in the House and Senate have said they will make monitoring abuses at the DOJ and 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 behavior at the Justice Department are afraid — and are resigning.”
“Let Dhillon and all officials in this administration be warned: resignation in no way relieves you of your legal obligation to answer for your conduct before Congress and the American people we represent,” he added. “Keep all your records, do not destroy any, and be prepared to testify honestly under oath. »
Eisenberg was a low-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 charging protesters with material support for terrorism. This is the first time in American history that these laws, expanded after 9/11, have been used against domestic protesters, TPM first reported, although some former officials told TPM that the charges appeared to have been brought by local U.S. attorneys’ offices outside of the division’s oversight.
Reding Quiñones oversaw the so-called “grand conspiracy” investigation, which was based on the idea that the various investigations into Trump’s conduct during his first term – starting with the Russia investigation and continuing – were elements of a single conspiracy to thwart him, which was broad and deep. He hired Joe DiGenova, a former prosecutor who represented a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch in Trump’s first impeachment, to oversee the investigation. And yet, even though the investigation was in the hands of an ally, the investigation went nowhere: DiGenova resigned in September.
Some reports indicate that Reding Quiñones was sidelined after allowing the law enforcement portions of his office to wither, preferring instead to focus on policy directives coming from the White House via Main Justice.
Some former prosecutors told TPM that other U.S. attorneys’ offices have begun separating political cases from the work of career prosecutors, with appointees, including U.S. attorneys and their first deputies, overseeing the former cases, which include election fraud investigations, while career staff handle the latter.
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