Justice Dept. Official Says She Was Fired After Opposing Restoring Mel Gibson’s Gun Rights

The Justice Department’s pardon attorney was dismissed a day after she refused to recommend that the actor Mel Gibson, a prominent supporter of President Trump’s, should have his gun rights restored, according to the attorney and others familiar with the situation.

Elizabeth G. Oyer, the former pardon attorney, described the sequence of events as an alarming departure from longstanding practice, one that put public safety and the department’s integrity at risk. Mr. Gibson had lost his gun rights as a result of a 2011 domestic violence misdemeanor conviction.

“This is dangerous. This isn’t political — this is a safety issue,” Ms. Oyer said in an interview with The New York Times as she described the internal discussions about whether to give gun rights back to people with domestic violence convictions.

Ms. Oyer’s account of a series of Justice Department discussions about guns, domestic violence and star power was confirmed by two other people familiar with the events, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.

She was one of a number of high-ranking Justice Department officials who were fired on Friday, the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to remove or demote senior career lawyers who play critical roles in department decisions. She was not told why she was dismissed, but as events unfolded, she feared that they might lead to her firing.

A Justice Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the disagreement over Mr. Gibson played no role in the decision to dismiss the pardon attorney.

About two weeks ago, Ms. Oyer was put on a working group to restore gun rights to people convicted of crimes, she said. That effort has been championed by some on the right who maintain that not all people with criminal convictions are dangerous or deserving of such a ban. Others contend that doing so, particularly when it comes to people with domestic violence convictions, carries significant risks.

It was an unusual assignment for the office of the pardon attorney, which typically handles requests for clemency and tries to focus on people who cannot hire well-connected lawyers to plead their cases to the White House, where the president has vast power to grant pardons in federal cases. Mr. Trump has a history of making pardon decisions without substantial input from the pardon attorney, but in this case Justice Department leaders planned to make the decision about gun rights on their own.

Federal law prohibits those convicted of crimes, including misdemeanor state domestic violence cases, from purchasing or owning a handgun. For decades, the law has technically given the Justice Department authority to restore gun ownership rights to specific individuals, but in practice that has not been done, in part because of significant limits imposed by Congress, Ms. Oyer said.

She said she was told that the working group would generate a list of candidates to get back their gun rights, 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.

Two weeks before Mr. Gibson’s lawyer sent the letter, Mr. Trump announced on social media that he had named Mr. Gibson and others “special ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California.”

The letter said that Mr. Gibson had in recent years tried to buy a gun but was refused because of his prior domestic violence conviction. Just this past weekend, Mr. Gibson was spotted at a U.F.C. event sitting with Mr. Trump’s new F.B.I. director, Kash Patel.

In 2011, Mr. Gibson pleaded no contest in Los Angeles Superior Court to a misdemeanor charge of battering his former girlfriend, as part of a deal with prosecutors that allowed him to avoid jail time. He received a sentence of community service, counseling and three years of probation, and was ordered to pay $570 in fines.

To Ms. Oyer, the request to add Mr. Gibson to her list was worrisome on multiple fronts. The other candidates had all undergone a significant amount of background investigation to measure their likelihood of committing another crime.

She did not know nearly as much about Mr. Gibson’s case.

“Giving 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,” Ms. Oyer said in an interview.

Law enforcement officials at the state, local and federal levels often fear that domestic abusers might reoffend.

Separately, Ms. Oyer was vaguely aware of a highly publicized episode in 2006 when Mr. Gibson was caught on tape being verbally abusive and antisemitic to a police officer who had stopped him on suspicion of driving under the influence.

Mr. Gibson has called the details of the 2011 episode “terribly humiliating and painful for my family,” and has denied that he ever treated anyone in a discriminatory manner.

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.

Several hours later, she got a call from a senior Justice Department official in Mr. Blanche’s office who had been working on the issue.

The official asked her: “Is your position flexible?”

It was not, she responded.

“He then 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,” she said.

His tone in the course of the 15-minute discussion shifted from friendly to condescending to bullying, Ms. Oyer said. In response, she told him that she would “think about whether there was a way we could thread the needle.”

She then spent a sleepless night trying to figure out how to navigate the predicament.

“I literally did not sleep a wink that night,” Ms. Oyer said, “because I understood that the position I was in was one that was going to either require me to compromise my strongly held views and ethics or would likely result in me losing my ability to participate in these conversations going forward.”

“I can’t believe this, but I really think Mel Gibson is going to be my downfall,” she told a trusted colleague.

On Friday morning, she wrote another draft memo to the attorney general’s office, trying to present the issue in a more informational way by saying she did not know many particulars of the Gibson case, and that it was ultimately the attorney general’s decision, Ms. Oyer said. Again, she did not recommend that Mr. Gibson get his gun rights back.

Hours later, she was sitting in an unrelated meeting when she got a frantic call from a member of her staff, saying she had to come back to her office right away.

When she got there, two building security officers were waiting to hand her a letter from Mr. Blanche firing her. They watched as she packed up some of her belongings into boxes and escorted her out of the building.

The general feeling in her office was one of shock, she said.

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.

The working group’s efforts were led in large part by Mr. McHenry and Paul R. Perkins, who worked in Mr. Blanche’s office, according to people familiar with the discussions.

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.