Joseph Tirrell was reaching the end of a vacation on 11 July, and watching TV at home. He checked his email on his phone and saw a message from his employer, the Department of Justice. He thought it was strange that he was receiving email from the government on his personal account. Inside was a message that he was being fired from his job as the top ethics official at the department.
The notice, signed by Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, did not give a reason for his firing. It also misspelled his first name, addressing it to “Jospeh W Tirrell”. Tirrell called his bosses at the department, who at first seemed as surprised as he did, before eventually confirming that he had in fact been terminated.
At the start of the year, Tirrell knew that he might attract scrutiny from the incoming administration because he had signed off on special counsel Jack Smith receiving pro-bono legal services from a private law firm as he prepared to leave the government, something Tirrell said was clearly allowed under the department’s ethics rules. As the department’s top ethics official, he was responsible for overseeing ethics compliance across the agency and training the department’s top officers in their obligations. But as months passed and Tirrell remained in his job, he thought he was safe.
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