Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks during a round table with US President Donald Trump about foreign fraudulent cryptocurrency investment schemes and the Trump's administration's efforts to prevent them at the White House in Washington, DC, US, October 21, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Brett Shumate, who led the Justice Department’s most aggressive courtroom defenses of President Donald Trump’s policies, quit Attorney General Todd Blanche’s department, the fifth senior official to leave since the election.
Blanche announced on X Monday that he had accepted Shumate's resignation as assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Division. The post gave no reason for his departure.
“We are grateful for Brett’s service at DOJ and wish him continued success,” Blanche wrote.
Shumate signed his name to some of the most controversial matters of Trump’s second term, including the tariffs case he argued and lost on appeal before the Supreme Court struck the tariffs down, Law&Crime reported.
“Civil Division head not a high profile job but VITAL to defending administration policies and priorities in court,” Politico reporter Josh Gerstein wrote on X.
The division’s Federal Programs Branch, which defends executive orders and other administration priorities, shrank from 113 attorneys to 71 in the first few months of Trump’s term while each lawyer’s workload rose 44%, according to internal charts obtained by The Hill.
Shumate’s departure takes the division’s top official away from a defense team that had already lost more than a third of its lawyers.
“Federal Programs Branch now down to about negative five attorneys, give or take a few,” appellate lawyer Sean Marotta joked on X.
The department told The Hill in September that the Civil Division had hired more than 200 new attorneys since Trump took office. It said the division was winning in court.
News of top-level exits has come far faster since Democrats won control of the House and Senate on Nov. 3 than in the weeks before.
Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon resigned Nov. 5, and National Security Division chief John Eisenberg and Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami who oversaw a probe of Trump’s adversaries, followed Nov. 6, Politico and The Hill reported. Henry Whitaker, a counselor to Blanche, is also leaving, Politico reported.
Dhillon was the second Senate-confirmed department official to leave in recent weeks, after Patrick Davis, the department’s liaison to Congress, resigned in October, Bloomberg Law reported. She told Fox News Digital that she decided to leave weeks before the election and that the White House asked her to wait until it was over.
“It breaks my heart that DOJ has become a sinking ship under this AG,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wrote on X Monday.
“The Department’s mission is unchanged: enforce the law, combat crime, and protect the American people,” Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said in a statement last week, according to Politico.
Staff shortages had strained the department’s work in court long before the post-election departures.
A Federal Programs Branch lawyer cited his office’s understaffing last year when a judge asked why the government had not offered more evidence at a hearing over the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bloomberg Law reported.
“[T]he refrain of ‘understaffing’ and ‘too many cases’ has worn out its welcome, particularly when it comes at the expense of individual rights,” U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino wrote earlier this year in a Minnesota case in which she found a government lawyer in contempt for not following her order, CBS News reported.
“I am hearing that DOJ is restaffing quickly, with more than one interview taking place with Blanche this week,” Washington Examiner reporter Kaelan Deese wrote on X Monday.
A permanent replacement would need Senate confirmation, which Shumate won on a 51-41 vote last year, Bloomberg Law reported at the time. Senate Democrats will have the power to delay any confirmation starting in January, Politico reported. That could leave an acting official running the division Shumate led.