DOJ Civil Division chief Brett Shumate resigns as departures stack up

Brett Shumate, the assistant attorney general who ran the Justice Department's Civil Division, resigned Monday. The exit was effective immediately, and lawyers inside the division were caught off guard by how abrupt it was, sources told CBS News.

Attorney General Todd Blanche praised Shumate on X, crediting him with pursuing what Blanche called important affirmative litigation to challenge sanctuary policies and with delivering wins against local policies that endangered federal law enforcement.

Shumate, a former Jones Day partner who also served in the Civil Division during Trump's first term, was viewed by division attorneys as a reasonable and decent leader while the department absorbed hundreds of lawsuits and took often novel legal positions to defend the government. Under his watch, the division backed mass firings of career civil servants who got letters citing Article II of the Constitution, defended aggressive deportation policies, and fought to keep Trump-directed renovation projects alive, including replacing the White House's East Wing with a ballroom and overhauls of the Kennedy Center and East Potomac Golf Course. It also faced a surge of habeas corpus petitions from detained immigrants after a DOJ-run immigration court ruled the government could hold a broad group of immigrants indefinitely while removal proceedings play out.

Shumate's departure lands in the middle of a run of high-level exits. The assistant attorneys general for the national security and civil rights divisions left last week, leaving both offices without Senate-confirmed leadership, and the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, who was overseeing the grand conspiracy investigation into Obama and Biden-era intelligence officials, stepped down too.

One source familiar with the matter told CBS News that new White House chief of staff Stephen Miller had criticized Shumate in the past, considering him insufficiently aggressive, and that this factored into his decision. Miller took the job late last week, replacing Susie Wiles.

Meanwhile, T. Elliot Gaiser, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, is under consideration by Trump for a judgeship on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, according to a Senate aide who confirmed the department filed his nomination paperwork. Gaiser wrote the classified legal justification for U.S. military boat strikes on suspected drug traffickers and has no direct Texas ties beyond a one-year clerkship on the Fifth Circuit.