LAST CHOPPER OUT

Stephen Miller’s Promotion Has Trump Goons Scrambling for Exits

DOJ officials are fleeing en masse to preserve their futures in law, a new report alleges.

DOJ officials are scrambling to leave the Trump administration in the wake of Republicans’ midterms shellacking and the promotion of Stephen Miller as chief of staff, a new report alleges.

Current and former DOJ officials tell Bloomberg Law that political appointees in the department are shopping around the private sector for career help, fearing for their future prospects in a post-Donald Trump job market.

Miller was promoted last week to White House chief of staff to replace the fired Susie Wiles, who was widely viewed as a stabilizing force in Trump’s inner circle. Since then, political appointees have begun mulling whether they should go down with a potentially sinking ship.

Miller’s “demands on day-to-day operations” have led individuals in the DOJ to seriously consider an exit route–even among staffers and officials who share his ideological aspirations, according to the Bloomberg Law report.

Reached for comment, DOJ spokeswoman Kiersten Pels told the site that a “vast majority” of appointees are proud of their work.

“The resounding truth is that the vast majority of political appointees at the Department are proud to work here,” Pels wrote. “[Appointees] have been proud to be a part of a team that has achieved the lowest crime rates across the country in generations and has delivered a record number of prosecutions on fraud, sex trafficking, violent crime, drug trafficking, and the list goes on... It may be less exciting than a clickbait headline, but it is the truth.”

Reports from last year indicate that Miller’s expectations for agenda items including immigration enforcement and “lawfare” against DEI and other initiatives were already incredibly demanding even as a deputy chief of staff.

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The DOJ has already experienced an exodus of high-level officials across the country since the beginning of this month. On Monday, Brette Shumate, the assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Division, voluntarily resigned as his division is inundated with lawsuits against the administration. Three other high-profile attorneys also resigned on the day of Miller’s appointment.

A nonprofit organization composed of DOJ alumni from both Democratic and Republican administrations has found that, as of September, the DOJ’s roughly 100,000-strong force had already decreased by eight percent since December 2024. By this point in their respective administrations, Joe Biden had a 0.5 percent decrease in DOJ staff, and Barack Obama’s second term had a 2.7 percent decrease.

U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche is also preparing for increased congressional oversight after Democrats’ overwhelming midterm victory, according to sources in Trump’s DOJ.

Some appointees expressed concerns that their reputations might take a bruising if they don’t abandon ship during Trump’s lame-duck period, the report added.

“There are people who realized things have fundamentally changed in the country, and if that’s the direction the president wants to go, they’re not as aligned anymore—partly because that’s not the direction America is going and also because they need to work,” one former Trump DOJ official told Bloomberg Law.

According to Bloomberg Law’s sources, two camps have emerged from the ashes of the devastating midterm defeats: MAGA-aligned lawyers planning to batten down the hatches against congressional investigations, and traditional conservative lawyers seeking to move to the private sector to preserve their bar licenses.

“If I’m a US attorney or if I’m in DC and I think I might be investigated, my instinct is, I’m getting the hell away from this,” one official said. “Where will I get a job in two years if and when the political winds change?”

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Christopher Buchanan

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