Liz Oyer
Former US Pardon Attorney, US Dept. of Justice
“I don’t want to be complicit in what is happening inside the Department of Justice, which is the misuse of the resources of the department to do political favors for friends of the president, political loyalists.” – Liz Oyer, on what motivated her refusal to make public the cost of Trump’s pardons
Liz Oyer was the Justice Department’s pardon attorney; her job was to ensure that any pardons the president wanted to issue should be considered only after sentences are served and restitution is paid. But when Donald Trump decided to pardon an enormous list of convicted felons on his return to office, he also removed the requirement that they should finish their jail terms and give restitution. This meant taxpayers lost at least $1 billion, a fact that Oyer made public through TikTok after she was fired with no stated reason. She simply added up the amounts these criminals were convicted of stealing and explained the process.
Among those Trump pardoned were 24 people sentenced for obstructing entrances to abortion clinics; 14 named ringleaders of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol; all of the other convicted January 6 rioters; and a slew of white-collar criminals whose fraud and embezzlement schemes added up to a huge cost. Among these were Trevor Milton, whom prosecutors argued should pay more than $680 million to shareholders he’d defrauded; Milton and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to Trump’s reelection campaign. Another restitution that Trump wiped out was a $100 million fine imposed on a crypto coin company, HDR Global Trading Limited (BitMEX), for money laundering. Oyer also spotlighted a particularly egregious case: Republican politician Michelle Fiore, who raised $70,000 for a memorial to police officers killed in the line of duty but spent it on plastic surgery and her daughter’s wedding. None of the victims of these frauds will now get their money back.
Oyer believes she was fired because she refused to recommend that the actor Mel Gibson be given the right to own guns again – a right that was revoked after he was convicted on domestic violence charges in 2011. “Giving guns back to domestic abusers is a serious matter that […] 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,” Oyer said.
The retaliation against Oyer was swift. The Justice Department planned to send US Marshals to her home to deliver a letter warning her not to testify to Congress about the Gibson incident, citing executive privilege. But she did testify and said: “I don’t want to be complicit in what is happening inside the Department of Justice, which is the misuse of the resources of the department to do political favors for friends of the president, political loyalists,” she told lawmakers.
Oyer received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and her law degree from Harvard; she served as executive editor of the Harvard Law Review. She clerked for the Honorable Stanley Marcus, US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and spent 10 years as a federal public defender. In May, Oyer was given the RFK Human Rights Award, along with Maine Governor Janet Mills and immigrant rights’ advocate Jeanette Vizguerra.
On May 16, Oyer filed suit against the Justice Department over her firing. As she says, “The longstanding mission of the Department of Justice – as stated right on the landing page of its website – is ‘to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights.’ The Department’s recent personnel practices run directly contrary to that mission in every respect. By firing career experts without cause or due process, the Department’s leadership is openly defying the laws it is entrusted to uphold, diminishing civil rights, and making our country less safe. That is why I am standing up and fighting back. I hope others might do the same.”
Oyer’s TikTok videos do a service for the public by explaining the complex rules of presidential pardons in simple, easy-to-understand terms for the layperson. In less than a minute, she tells us all what government corruption means and why we should care. She’s an example of courage in standing up and telling the truth in a way that reaches everyone.