She Refused to Put Mel Gibson on the Gun-Rights List. Eighteen Months Later, She Is Suing.

Liz Oyer, the Justice Department's former pardon attorney, sued the government on Thursday over a firing she says was punishment for refusing to do a political favor for a friend of the president. The favor, according to her complaint, was adding the actor Mel Gibson to a list of people the department would recommend for restoration of their gun rights.

Oyer had spent about three years as pardon attorney when she was assigned in early 2025 to identify candidates for gun-rights restoration. She compiled a list of roughly 95 people convicted long ago of nonviolent offenses, each vetted by the department. Then, she says, staff for Todd Blanche — at the time the deputy attorney general — asked her to add Gibson. She objected on public safety grounds, citing the domestic violence conviction that cost Gibson his gun privileges in the first place.

According to the lawsuit, hours after she drafted a memo laying out those concerns in March 2025, a colleague pulled her out of an unrelated meeting, Justice Department security officers handed her a termination letter, told her to pack her belongings, and escorted her from the building. She received no written notice beforehand and no opportunity to respond. The following month, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi agreed to restore Gibson's gun rights.

Blanche, who is now the attorney general, has denied her account. "I didn't even know of that. I had known nothing about Mel Gibson or that letter when I fired her. Nothing," he told senators at his confirmation hearing last month. He said Oyer was dismissed "for a number of reasons," including recommendations she made in the closing weeks of the Biden administration that he called "completely inconsistent with President Trump's authority," among them a recommendation to commute the sentence of every person on federal death row. Biden ultimately commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences, leaving in place those of Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Robert Bowers.

Oyer, who testified against Blanche's nomination, told senators that explanation was the first she had ever heard of it and that the claim her firing had nothing to do with Gibson "materialized out of thin air and has never been stated before."

The suit was filed in federal court in Washington and asks for a declaration that the firing was unlawful and for reinstatement to federal service. Oyer says she went to court only after the Merit Systems Protection Board, which normally handles federal personnel claims, left her case in "prolonged limbo" and declined to act. She argues the removal violated civil service protections and her First Amendment rights, because it was based in part on her perceived political affiliation.

"If career officials like me can be fired for refusing to bend the rules to serve the president's friends, then the message to every public servant is clear: loyalty to a politician matters more than loyalty to the Constitution," she said in a statement. "I cannot accept that." Hers is one of a series of suits by Justice Department employees challenging terminations under the current administration.