Attorney General Pam Bondi has fired the ethics director at the Department of Justice in a four-sentence letter that misspells his name, marking the latest departure from the agency during a mass exodus of career prosecutors under Donald Trump’s administration.
A letter to “Jospeh Tirrell” sent on July 11 and seen by The Independent notes his termination is “effective immediately” but does not state a reason why he was abruptly fired.
Joseph Tirrell, who had served as the director of the Justice Department’s ethics office since 2023, was responsible for reviewing financial disclosures and other matters related to the attorney general’s office and other top law enforcement officials. He led a team of roughly 30 people to ensure government lawyers and other officials adhered to ethical guidelines.
“My public service is not over, and my career as a federal civil servant is not finished,” he wrote Monday on LinkedIn. “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.”
Tirrell’s firing follows Bondi’s purge of roughly 20 Justice Department employees involved in former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into the former president. Tirrell had reportedly approved Smith’s receipt of $140,000 in pro bono legal fees from the firm Covington & Burling before his resignation. It is unclear whether Tirrell’s firing is related.
Shortly after taking office, the president dismissed the government’s top ethics watchdog, sparking a legal battle that reached the Supreme Court. That independent Office of Government Ethics would regularly consult with Tirrell’s team.
Tirrell’s sudden firing also “shines a bright spotlight back on her own glaring ethical conflicts and how she’s handled major DOJ decisions involving her former clients, including the government of Qatar and Pfizer, according to Jon Golinger with democratic advocacy group Public Citizen. “The question this drastic firing raises is: are there even worse ethics problems Bondi is trying to hide?”
Career prosecutors are also quitting the agency in droves since Trump’s election.
More than 100 lawyers at the Justice Department’s federal programs bench, which defends the president’s policy actions in court, have left their positions in recent months. Roughly 250 attorneys at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — accounting for 70 percent of the lawyers there – also quit the agency within the first few months of the Trump administration.
The latest shakeups at the Justice Department also arrive as the administration fumbles for answers about investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, as MAGA loyalists turn on the president, Bondi and other top law enforcement officials over the administration’s failure to release more information about the sex offender and his alleged client list.
The Justice Department last week said Epstein, who was facing charges of sex trafficking, did not leave behind such a list, though Bondi in February suggested it was on her desk. She later said she was referring to the overall case.
But the Justice Department ultimately concluded that public disclosure of such materials would be inappropriate and remain under seal by a federal judge, frustrating the president’s supporters and conspiracy theorists who have linked the Epstein case to allegations of a wider corruption and sex abuse scandal involving minors and powerful figures.
The Independent has requested comment from the Justice Department.
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