By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department’s senior ethics official resigned on Tuesday, after President Donald Trump’s administration pulled him off his duties and assigned him to a new sanctuary cities working group, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The official, Bradley Weinsheimer, decided to accept the government’s deferred resignation offer rather than accept the reassignment, the latest in a string of nonpolitical career Justice Department officials who have resisted efforts that they say politicize investigations.
Dozens of career Justice Department officials – who normally remain in office from one administration to the next – in cities including Washington and New York have been fired, reassigned or quit since Trump took office on January 20, after he vowed to rapidly shake up a department that he says was used against him during his years out of power.
Last week, seven people resigned in protest, including two top officials who oversee the most politically sensitive investigations, after acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered them to drop criminal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Weinsheimer, a 34-year department veteran who was named to his current role as associate deputy attorney general during Trump’s first term, provided ethics counsel to department officials related to conflicts of interest, including on decisions related to when they should be recused from working on particular cases.
He also reviewed disciplinary recommendations by the Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates attorney misconduct, and referrals for discipline or prosecution from the Office of the Inspector General.
Weinsheimer did not return a request for comment. When Reuters tried to reach him in the evening on Tuesday, his government email responded with an auto-generated message saying he was “on administrative leave pursuant to the deferred resignation program.”
On January 27, around the same time Weinsheimer was reassigned, Bove delegated all ethics-related decisions to two political appointees.
One of them, Kendra Wharton, previously worked alongside Bove and Todd Blanche, the president’s nominee to serve as deputy attorney general, to help defend Trump against criminal charges in New York alleging he falsified records to cover up hush money paid to a porn star.
The other, Bove’s chief of staff Jordan Fox, graduated law school in 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile.
“Bradley is the senior career ethics official at the Justice Department and provides advice to people across the country and in the building on really important and weighty matters,” said Joyce Vance, the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, noting that the job he performed was apolitical.
She said the reassignment of ethical decision-making to two political appointees is troubling, adding: “This is evidence that the Justice Department is being weaponized.”
Chad Gilmartin, a spokesman for the Justice Department, rejected any criticism of the move by Bove to delegate the ethics decision-making to Wharton and Fox.
“Kendra has a decade of experience as a criminal defense lawyer, which is exactly the mindset we want in such a role,” he said. He added that Fox “is a highly respected attorney.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, Blanche and Bove, who will serve as principal associate deputy attorney general once Blanche is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, all previously served as defense attorneys for Trump.
The White House has previously argued that the Department of Justice was weaponized against Trump when it pursued charges against him for retaining classified documents and subverting the 2020 election.
The department dropped both cases after Trump won the November 2024 election, citing a longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
On Bondi’s first day as Attorney General, she issued a directive creating a new “weaponization working group” that would be tasked with reviewing two criminal cases brought against Trump by former Special Counsel Jack Smith for retaining classified documents and trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, as well as Trump’s conviction in New York.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Aurora Ellis)
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