Official Says She Was Fired Over Mel Gibson Gun Rights

Former Justice Department pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer says the day before she was fired, she told a colleague: "I can't believe this, but I really think Mel Gibson is going to be my downfall." Oyer tells the New York Times that she was dismissed last Friday after declining to add the actor to a list of people who should have their gun rights restored. Oyer was the leader of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, which the Guardian describes as a "non-political role, supervising matters of clemency and recommendations for presidential pardon."

• Gibson, a prominent supporter of President Trump, lost his gun rights after pleading no contest to a domestic violence misdemeanor in 2011, USA Today reports. Days before his inauguration, Trump named him as one of his "ambassadors to Hollywood."
• Oyer says she was put on a working group two weeks ago to restore gun rights to people convicted of crimes. She tells the Times that after Deputy Attorney Todd Blanche's office selected nine people from a list of 95 the group had submitted, she was asked to add Gibson's name to the list.

• She says she found the request worrying because unlike others on the list, whose convictions were mostly decades old, there had not been a significant background check to look at the risk of Gibson reoffending.
• "Giving guns back to domestic abusers is a serious matter that, in my view, is not something that I could recommend lightly, necause there are real consequences that flow from people who have a history of domestic violence being in possession of firearms," Oyer says.
• She tells the Times that after she told her bosses that she couldn't recommend restoring Gibson's gun rights, an official in Blanche's office "essentially explained to me that Mel Gibson has a personal relationship with President Trump and that should be sufficient basis for me to make a recommendation and that I would be wise to make the recommendation."

• Oyer says that the next day, she didn't recommend restoring the actor's gun rights, but sent a draft memo saying it was ultimately the attorney general's decision. She was abruptly fired hours later.
• She was among multiple high-ranking officials dismissed that day, and a Justice Department source tells NBC News that the decision had been made before the Gibson email. Another source, however, says the move was "part of a very concerning set of personnel moves" across the department and the rest of the federal government. "I don't know how much of what happened to Liz was a failure to toe the line about a specific thing," the official tells NBC News. "But, systematically, the political leadership of this administration is doing their best to take away the institutional guardrails."

(More Justice Department stories.)