We may still be waiting to hear what, exactly, Attorney General Pam Bondi will recommend after President Trump tasked her with examining the ATF rules and DOJ policies on Second Amendment issues put in place by the Biden administration, but according to a report by the New York Times, one of the issues that Team Trump has been working on is restoring the Second Amendment rights for at least some individuals who’ve lost their ability to legally keep and bear arms after a criminal conviction.
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A now-former DOJ attorney tells the Times she was fired from her position after she refused to recommend restoring the right to purchase and possess a firearm to actor Mel Gibson, who was stripped of his 2A rights after a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction in 2011. According to Elizabeth G. Oyer, she was placed in a “working group” about two weeks ago that was tasked coming up with a list of individuals who should have their rights restored, which the paper describes as “part of a longer-term effort to have the attorney general restore such rights to some individuals.”
Her office, she said, came up with an initial batch of 95 people she considered worthy of consideration, made up principally of people whose convictions were decades old, who had asked for the restriction to be lifted and for whom Ms. Oyer’s office thought the risk of recidivism was low.
That list was given to advisers in the office of the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, which whittled the 95 candidates down to just nine. Ms. Oyer said she was asked to submit a draft memo recommending that those nine get their gun rights back, which she did on Thursday.
Then came the request.
“They sent it back to me saying, ‘We would like you to add Mel Gibson to this memo’,” she said. Attached to the request, she said, was a January letter that Mr. Gibson’s lawyer had written to two senior Justice Department officials, James R. McHenry III and Emil Bove III, arguing for his gun rights to be restored, saying that he had been tapped for a special appointment by the president and that he had made a number of big, successful movies.
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Oyer objected to adding Gibson to the whittled-down list of nine names (none of whom, by the way, have been identified by the Times), telling the paper that “[g]iving guns back to domestic abusers is a serious matter that, in my view, is not something that I could recommend lightly, because there are real consequences that flow from people who have a history of domestic violence being in possession of firearms.”
Separately, Ms. Oyer was vaguely aware of a highly publicized episode in 2006 when Mr. Gibson was caught being verbally abusive and antisemitic to a police officer who had stopped him on suspicion of driving under the influence and recorded at least some of the exchange.
Mr. Gibson has denied that he ever treated anyone in a discriminatory manner, and has also called the details of the 2011 domestic violence episode “terribly humiliating and painful for my family.”
In a brief email, she responded to her Justice Department superiors that she could not recommend that the attorney general restore Mr. Gibson’s gun rights.
Oyer alleges that over the next day or so she had more pressure applied to her, but when she refused to recommend Gibson’s rights be restored she was summarily dismissed on Friday.
DOJ officials, however, contend that Gibson had nothing to do with Oyer’s dismissal, and in her conversation with the paper Oyer made it pretty clear that her problems with the DOJ plan wasn’t solely related to the actor’s case.
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Ms. Oyer said the entire plan seemed to disregard the type of care and attention to detail that the Justice Department typically uses in evaluating cases.
She said she was told that the small batch of people to get their gun rights back would be the first step toward a broader policy goal, achieved through rewriting Justice Department regulations, to more clearly give that power to the attorney general.
She was very alarmed, she said, that officials kept insisting that the process for restoring such rights should be “automated,” rather than based on a review of the facts of the cases.
Within the working group, the government lawyers seemed to generally agree that a significant period of time since a conviction should have passed for someone to be eligible for such relief, perhaps 10 or 15 years, and that it should not be extended to convicted murderers and armed robbers. But the issue of domestic violence proved to be a sticking point, particularly when it came to Mr. Gibson.
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Ms. Oyer was told, she said, that senior officials wanted to make a public announcement quickly about their decision regarding the first batch of people with convictions who had their gun rights restored. As of Monday evening, no such announcement had been made.
Now, I’d take Oyer’s version of events with some boulder-sized grains of salt given her termination last Friday. An “automated” system of restoring rights seems to me to conflict with her statement that the AG would be given more power to restore those rights, for instance. And while I wouldn’t be surprised if Donald Trump or another official pushed to have Gibson’s name included on the initial list of individuals who were recommended for rights restoration, it sounds like he would have met most of the criteria for inclusion that the working group came up with.
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Gibson was convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence offense almost 15 years ago, and since then has avoided any other trouble with the law. The actor maintains that he was innocent of battery, but pled no contest in order to spare his children and family from the “circus” of a trial. Gibson was sentenced to community service, counseling and three years of probation, which he apparently completed without incident.
If there had been any evidence of ongoing abusive behavior then I would completely understand Oyer’s refusal to recommend restoring Gibson’s right to own a firearm, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. And despite Oyer’s contention that the Trump administration wants to “automate” the restoration of rights process, the fact that a working group was set up to make recommendations suggests that while the criteria for restoring Second Amendment rights might be standardized, the decision itself was still being done on a case-by-case basis.
If nothing else, the New York Times report indicates that the Trump administration is willing to touch one of the third rails of 2A politics by advocating for the restoration of rights for at least some individuals. If that’s the case, then I’d say there’s an excellent chance that the DOJ and ATF policies put in place under Biden will be formally rescinded by Trump, even over the objections of D.C. bureaucrats intent on keeping the status quo in place.
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