Bondi Fires Head of DOJ Ethics Office in Ongoing Purge

Attorney General Pam Bondi fired Director of the Departmental Ethics Office Joseph Tirrell without explanation, “effective immediately,” in her ongoing purge of people in the Department of Justice who had any involvement with criminal probes by former special counsel Jack Smith.

She used the same type of canned termination letter as for federal workers of lower rank and misspelled his name. In his 15 years at the DOJ, Tirrell served for a while as its acting Director.

This was only part of an ongoing purge of the DOJ. Bondi recently fired up to 20 people whose shared history included working in former special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal probes of the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol and the classified documents Donald Trump kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort after his first term in office.

Tirrell became Director of the Departmental Ethics Office in 2023. In that role he was responsible for advising Jack Smith, Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on matters of ethics. The DOJ website says the role is “responsible for administering the Department-wide ethics program and for implementing Department-wide policies on ethics issues,” and “provides advice and training directly to employees in the Department’s Senior Management Offices, the Justice Management Division, the Office of Public Affairs, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, the Office of Dispute Resolution, and the Office of Tribal Justice, and supervises the ethics programs in the remaining Department components.”

On LinkedIn, Tirrell wrote:

My public service is not over, and my career as a Federal civil servant is not finished. I took the oath at 18 as a Midshipman to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ I have taken that oath at least five more times since then. That oath did not come with the caveat that I need only support the Constitution when it is easy or convenient.

I look forward to finding ways to continue in my personal calling of service to my country. I encouraged anyone who is reading this to do the same. I believe in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ I also believe that Edmund Burke is right and that ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

Click here for more details.