Resignation Letters from Senior Officials Highlight the Mass Purge & Authoritarian Takeover

Emil Bove's Note to DOJ Attorneys: Department attorneys should be committed to supporting “our critical mission.” For anyone who found themselves wavering, find a resignation letter online"

What Bove’ calls, “Our Critical Mission” is Trump Speak for “Did you vote for Trump and will you support his policies above all other considerations, including the Constitution as well as your personal honor and ethical code?”

This is a full reprint of the Washington Post Article

‘We will not falter.’ Trump-era resignation letters take center stage.

Story by Jeremy Roebuck

‘We will not falter.’ Trump-era resignation letters take center stage.© Illustration by Marissa Vonesh/The Washington Post; iStock

Six weeks into a second term in which he promises to make America “great again,” Donald Trump’s presidency is contributing to a resurgence of a different sort — the art of the well-crafted resignation letter.

Dozens of federal officials and employees have quit in protest or been forced out amid the seismic upheavals the new administration has unleashed across government agencies. And a number of the departing have documented their discontent in missives that have found their way into public view.

Their letters range from the poignant — like the goodbye note from a disabled veteran in the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review who said a “relentless stream of unwarranted criticism” from top administration officials had harmed his health — to the pointed, including a memo from a top DOJ communications adviser who blamed Trump appointees for ushering in a “toxic work environment.”

There was the eloquent departure note from David Lebryk, the Treasury Department’s highest-ranking career official, which he used to remind remaining colleagues that their work “makes a difference and is so very important to the country.” And the more impudent letter from a National Institutes of Health official who likened Trump to a terrorist.

Taken together, the burst of epistolary activity — from career bureaucrats who in many cases worked under Democratic and Republican presidents — amounts to a collective cry of frustration in response to an administration they feel has belittled and discounted their work.

“We will not bend. We will not falter,” wrote James E. Dennehy, the top agent in the FBI’s New York field office, as he announced his forced retirement to his staff in an email Monday that was obtained by The Washington Post. “We will not sacrifice what is right for anything or anyone.”

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly derided the federal workforce as bloated, laid off workers and signed executive orders aimed at making it easier to fire career civil servants. He has accused some federal employees of seeking to frustrate his agenda, calling them members of what he’s dubbed the bureaucratic “deep state.”

Dennehy, who had led the New York FBI office since September, said he was not given a reason for the ultimatum he received last week to retire or be fired. But it came days after Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly accused his office, without providing evidence, of withholding investigative files tied to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In another publicly leaked all-hands email last month, Dennehy urged his staff to stay calm and “dig in” as he pushed back against demands from Trump administration officials to hand over the names of agents who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

He alluded to the language of that message in his note marking his departure, which also detailed the “top 10” things he would miss about the FBI.

“I’ve been told many times in my life, ‘When you find yourself in a hole, sometimes it’s best to quit digging,’” the former Marine wrote. “Screw that. I will never stop defending this joint.”

The FBI declined to comment on Dennehy’s letter. He is one of many to register his grievances on the way out the door.

Last month, Jim Jones, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, assailed the “indiscriminate firing” of dozens of his employees and recent rhetoric from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy in his resignation letter, addressed to the FDA’s acting commissioner.

“It has been increasingly clear that with the Trump administration’s disdain for the very people necessary to implement your agenda … it would have been fruitless for me to continue in this role,” Jones wrote.

Twenty-one apolitical federal technology staffers whose work was subsumed into the U.S. DOGE Service quit together last week, using their joint sign-off to condemn the tactics of Trump adviser Elon Musk and his appointees working to slash the size of the federal government.

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the resigning employees wrote.

Joshua M. Lashbrook — the disabled veteran and chief information officer at the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Office of Information Technology — wrote that his “service to the nation has never been about politics” and blamed criticism and negative remarks for his decision to leave.

“I have come to the painful realization that it is no longer healthy for me to remain in this position and that it is time for me to step away,” he wrote last week.

And in a particularly barbed kiss-off, which he posted to LinkedIn, Nathaniel Brought — former director of the National Institutes of Health’s Executive Secretariat — accused Trump of a host of misdeeds, including overseeing a “lifelong fight against justice” and “keeping billionaires happy on the backs of the poor.”

“I did not make sure terrorists met their makers so that I could watch one lead and then attack my country,” wrote Brought, whose 23-year government career also included stints with the National Security Agency and as an active-duty Marine.

Asked about the letters, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with the written equivalent of a shrug.

“President Trump is only interested in the best and most qualified people who are also willing to implement his America First Agenda on behalf of the American people,” she wrote in a statement. “It’s not for everyone, and that’s okay.”

Nowhere has the friction between Trump administration officials and their employees come into sharper relief than in the exchanges that emerged from the Justice Department last month in a seven-day span in which at least nine veteran attorneys resigned in protest.

They included a top career official overseeing criminal prosecutions in the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia and the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The latter, Danielle Sassoon, accused top Justice Department officials of engaging in a “quid pro quo” with attorneys for New York Mayor Eric Adams.

Adams’s attorneys, she wrote, had offered the mayor’s support for Trump immigration policies in exchange for the dismissal of a corruption case against him — an accusation the mayor’s lawyers have denied.

“Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer,” Sassoon wrote in her Feb. 12 letter explaining that she was resigning instead of carrying out an order from acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove to drop the case.

Danielle Sassoon, who resigned as acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in front of the federal courthouse in late 2023.© Bloomberg /Bloomberg via Getty Images

Sassoon highlighted her past work clerking for conservative judges like J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, citing the commitment she said both men had instilled in her to “uphold the rule of law.”

“I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful,” she said.

Bove, in a letter of his own, accused Sassoon of “insubordination and misconduct” and “losing sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice.”

Others — including almost all the supervisors in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section in Washington — followed Sassoon out the door, with some offering even more pointed goodbyes.

Ryan Crosswell, a Justice Department trial attorney with a decade of experience, cited a meeting in which he said Bove threatened to fire the department’s remaining public corruption lawyers if one of them would not volunteer to help end the Adams case.

“I cannot work for someone who invokes leadership after forcing dedicated public servants to choose between termination and a dismissal so plainly at odds with prosecutorial principals,” Crosswell wrote in a message to Bondi.

Former President Donald Trump attorneys Emil Bove, left, and Todd Blanche leave the U.S. federal courthouse in Washington after a 2024 hearing.© Jose Luis Magana/AP

Bove has made clear he isn’t opposed to more departures.

In an acidly worded statement about the Adams case issued days after Crosswell’s letter, the acting deputy attorney general said all Justice Department attorneys should be committed to supporting “our critical mission.”

For anyone who found themselves wavering, Bove added, “templates for resignation letters” are widely available online.