A top DoJ official trained Pam Bondi on ethics rules in the department. Then he was fired

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.

Tirrell is one of scores of career federal employees this year who have been dismissed without reason. He is now suing the department over his firing.

Those dismissed include prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases, FBI agents who kneeled during the 2020 George Floyd racial justice protests, and those who worked under Smith, who criminally charged Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and retain classified documents. Many of those employees and other experts have said the firings create a dangerous environment in which career non-partisan federal employees, who are supposed to be protected from political interference, live in fear of losing their jobs for simply doing what is asked of them.

“I think the reason to fire the senior ethics attorney at DoJ is pretty clear. It’s to send a message,” he said. “The message is: ‘Do what we tell you to do, or you’ll lose your job.’”

Tirrell, 51, joined the FBI as an ethics lawyer in 2006 before joining the justice department in 2018. In every administration, he said, there were requests about whether or not employees could accept certain gifts or attend certain events. Usually those were dispensed with quickly, so he and his staff could focus on more complex ethical matters, like potential conflicts of interests.

But this year, Tirrell found himself fighting protracted battles over those smaller matters that usually would be resolved fairly easily.

When Tirrell trained Bondi on the justice department’s ethics rules, he wanted to be mindful of her time, so he prepared in advance for some hot topics he thought might come up, including the Hatch Act and ethical considerations around Bondi’s prior work for Trump. But when he got to the training, he said Bondi and her chief of staff were focused on a smaller question: could the attorney general accept commemorative challenge coins from subordinates in the department?

“We’ve pretty much said you can’t accept gifts from employees unless it’s your birthday or Christmas or Hanukkah or a similar kind of holiday where people give gifts,” Tirrell said. “We spent more time than I thought was warranted on something, in frankly my view unimportant, as whether or not you could accept a challenge coin from whomever.

“There seemed to be a lot of importance by these officials placed on [the] appearance of them getting stuff,” he added. “On the appearance of them showing their willingness to accept that gift.”

For example, early on in the administration, Bondi received a box of cigars from the mixed martial artist Conor McGregor, with a note congratulating her on becoming the attorney general, Tirrell said. The value of the gift exceeded what Bondi could accept under the department’s ethics rules, so the attorney general had three options: pay for the gift herself, send it back, or destroy it. (Tirrell said in his experience, employees will rarely open their pocketbooks to personally pay for a gift.)

“Immediately I got the sense they were reluctant to send things back or destroy stuff,” he said referring to the attorney general’s office. “It’s like: ‘No we can’t send it back, I mean what does that say?’’”

Seeking to build a rapport with Bondi’s office, Tirrell said he figured out a way to keep the cigars. The department would accept the gift and put it on display for everyone to see, preventing Bondi from personally benefiting from the cigars. “Nobody gets to smoke the cigars,” he said. “We put the box up, which had some engraving on it I think, and the AG gets to say: ‘Oh look how nice Mr McGregor and the MMA organization [are], they’re good members of the community.”

Tirrell said he felt relatively comfortable with his decision. MMA is set to hold a fight at the White House on Donald Trump’s birthday next year and one of the potential participants is McGregor. “If we’d known more about that at the time, we might have raised more concerns about the ethics of accepting that gift,” he said.

A justice department official said the cigars and cigar box were destroyed.

There were also gifts from Fifa, which is set to host the World Cup in the US, Canada, and Mexico this year. Earlier this year, Tirrell said, Bondi received a scarf and a 2025 World Cup soccer ball from the organization. (The New Yorker reported Trump gave her the ball after a meeting with Fifa). Again, the value of the items exceeded what Bondi could accept and Tirrell said he told her as much. He received pushback.

“We were going back and forth ‘you know what about keeping this for display?’,” he said. The items, he said, were “not really the kind of thing we would put up on the wall”.

A justice department official said the soccer ball was accepted as a gift on behalf of the department.

While those conversations were ongoing, Tirrell received word that Bondi was likely to be invited to a Fifa club World Cup final in July 2025. Tirrell pre-emptively wrote to Bondi’s office saying that ethics rules prohibited her and her staff from accepting tickets to attend the event. “We got some questions like: ‘What if we’re doing this, and what if we’re doing that?’ And the answers were: ‘Probably not, no, you can’t go, you can’t do this’,” Tirrell said. Then Bondi’s office asked if Bondi could attend if the president was there and had a question about security at the event.

Tirrell responded and recalled saying something along the lines of: “If the president’s there and he’s got a question about security at the event, the AG, can walk into the booth, you know, walk into the box seats and say: ‘Mr President, here’s what’s going on with security. Right? Answer your question, sir. All right, excellent. Enjoy the game. I’ll be outside.’”

Tirrell gave his advice the week before he was fired. Two days after he received notice of his dismissal, Bondi was photographed at the game with Trump. “Maybe the attorney general paid for that ticket or a ticket of her spouse, right?,” Tirrell said. “Maybe she sat in that box seat, facing the president and not watching the game right for three hours, was answering security questions. But, you know, come on, I know that’s not the case.”

Asked about Bondi’s attendance at the match, a justice department official said career ethics officials are regularly consulted, and their advice has never been overruled.

Tirrell said the problems around Bondi accepting seats at the game were related to showing fair and impartial law enforcement, particularly because Fifa has an interest in the US immigration policy as travelers around the world arrive to watch the tournament. “Fifa has an interest beyond sort of the normal: ‘Hey, can we get security?’” he said.

There were other issues that raised concerns for Tirrell.

Sometime this spring, he said, he was asked to work on a plan related to how the justice department could deploy the hundreds of millions of dollars private law firms had pledged in pro-bono work as part of agreements with the Trump administration. The government cannot simply deploy private lawyers to handle government work, Tirrell said. So one idea was to explore whether the DoJ could accept the funds from the firms and then use that money to hire the firm’s lawyers at their current salaries for a period of time before sending them back to the firms.

“As soon as it was explained to me, without even really having to do any legal research. I knew that this was a non-starter,” he said. Under ethics and bar rules, there would have been conflicts of interests between the government and private practice work.

“The only way that those attorneys would have been able to come over is if their law firms had gotten a waiver from every client at the firm permitting that attorney to work for the government on every single matter that that attorney was involved in,” he said. “You’re not going to tell some client: ‘Hey I’m working on this secret investigation.’”

Tirrell said that he and other officials discussed the idea at a meeting earlier this year and another official said they needed to find a way to get rid of the obstacles.

“I said to him: ‘These are not obstacles. These are safety guidelines, these are safety rails. And you can’t remove them.’”

A justice department spokesperson said no such proposal is under consideration.

Ever since he was 15, Tirrell said he has never wanted to do anything else but work for the United States. He joined the US navy and after he said he wanted to be an attorney because “those are the people that do some of the most important work for our country that aren’t in uniform.”

After law school, he found his way by chance to a compliance job at the FBI, where he quickly found himself contributing to major cases in important ways. After the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016, for example, Tirrell said he helped negotiate an agreement for free office space so the FBI could be onsite for family members.

“I loved every minute of it,” he said of his tenure working for the federal government. “No desire to do anything else until now.”