DOJ Attorney Says She Lost Her Job Because She Wouldn’t Let Mel Gibson Get A Pew Pew

Hollywood star Mel Gibson is not allowed to own a gun. In 2011, he pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery of a former girlfriend and was recorded making death threats against her. So, yeah, he can’t own firearms.

But Gibson is also Donald Trump’s special little snowflake, otherwise known as “special ambassador” to Hollywood.

Former Justice Department pardon attorney Elizabeth G. Oyer told the New York Times she was pressured by the Trump administration to recommend the restoration of Gibson’s gun rights. Oyer was put on a working group to assess the restoration of gun rights for people convicted of crimes.

She said she 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, she said, 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 Ms. Oyer’s office thought the risk of recidivism was low.

The Lethal Weapon star was not on Oyer’s list. She received a call from U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office noting that Gibson “has a personal relationship with President Trump and that should be sufficient basis for me to make a recommendation and that I would be wise to make the recommendation.”

But the request disturbed Oyer, she notes, “Giving guns back to domestic abusers is a serious matter that, in my view, is not something that I could recommend lightly, because there are real consequences that flow from people who have a history of domestic violence being in possession of firearms.” 

As gun safety advocacy group Everytown notes, domestic abusers that own a gun are five times more likely to kill their partners than those without. And it’s a position Oyer agrees with, saying, “This is dangerous. This isn’t political ― this is a safety issue.”

“I literally did not sleep a wink that night,” Ms. Oyer said, “because I understood that the position I was in was one that was going to either require me to compromise my strongly held views and ethics or would likely result in me losing my ability to participate in these conversations going forward.”

“I can’t believe this, but I really think Mel Gibson is going to be my downfall,” she told a trusted colleague.

Hours after she submitted her final memo on the matter, Oyer was fired.

The Justice Department denied that Oyer’s recommendation in the Gibson matter was the cause of her termination.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

The post DOJ Attorney Says She Lost Her Job Because She Wouldn’t Let Mel Gibson Get A Pew Pew appeared first on Above the Law.