Staff with the Department of Justice (DOJ) had until Monday to accept a second offer to federal workers that allows them to resign from their roles and be paid through September. There were roughly 340 employees as of Monday, but Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told CNN more than 100 DOJ attorneys accepted the offer to resign. Dhillon, who oversees the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ, said he expects the final number of resignations to surpass 200 attorneys, which could be well over 70% of its workforce.
“What we have made very clear last week in memos to each of the 11 sections in the Civil Rights Division is that our priorities under President Trump are going to be somewhat different than they were under President Biden,” Dhillon said in an interview with conservative host Glenn Beck. “And then we tell them, these are the President’s priorities, this is what we will be focusing on — you know, govern yourself accordingly. And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.”
DOJ Attorneys Resign Amid Shifting From Protecting Voting Rights Laws To ‘New Priorities’
The DOJ was established in the 1950s in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. Its priorities since the 50s have been upholding the rule of law and protecting civil rights. Dhillon and Attorney General Pam Bondi have made it clear that the new priorities would shift away from enforcing voting rights laws and fighting discrimination against minority groups to cracking down on antisemitism, rooting out anti-Christian bias and “woke ideology.”
“I think that’s fine, because we don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute, you know, police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence,” Dhillion continued on Beck’s show about the resignations. That’s not the job here. The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”
However, Democrats are sounding the alarm on these resignations. Several top Democrats sent a letter to Bondi, Dhillon, and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz Monday raising concerns over what they described as the “politicization” of the DOJ’s civil rights division, ABC News reported.
Still, Dhillion says the DOJ is looking for more lawyers and investigations to “do the work” alongside people in the United States to help identify these issues for the DOJ.
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