Actor Mel Gibson is at the center of the latest controversy to come out of the Trump administration after pardon attorney Elizabeth G. Oyer told The New York Times that she was fired after she refused to recommend that Gibson's gun rights be restored.
Gibson—the star of Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, and Braveheart—pleaded no contest in Los Angeles Superior Court to a misdemeanor charge of battering his former girlfriend, resulting in the loss of his gun rights as part of a deal with prosecutors that allowed him to avoid jail time.
As part of his sentence, he was ordered to complete community service, attend counseling, serve three years of probation, and pay $570 in fines. In a recorded conversation, he had also made a death threat, saying he would beat her with a baseball bat and plant her in a rose garden.
Federal law prohibits individuals convicted of crimes, including misdemeanor state domestic violence offenses, from purchasing or owning a firearm. While the law technically grants the Justice Department the authority to restore gun ownership rights to certain individuals, this has rarely been done due to significant restrictions imposed by Congress.
On this fact, Oyer told the Times:
“Giving guns back to domestic abusers is a serious matter that, in my view, is not something that I could recommend lightly, because there are real consequences that flow from people who have a history of domestic violence being in possession of firearms."
Oyer was assigned to a working group focused on restoring gun rights to individuals with criminal convictions, an initiative supported by some on the right who argue that not all people with such records pose a danger or deserve a lifelong firearms ban. Others warn that reinstating gun rights, especially for those with domestic violence convictions, presents serious safety risks.
Oyer said the group’s goal was to identify candidates who could potentially have their gun rights restored, as part of a broader effort for the attorney general to consider such cases.
Her office initially compiled a list of 95 individuals—primarily people whose convictions were decades old, who had formally requested the restriction be lifted, and whom her office deemed to have a low risk of reoffending.
That list was passed on to advisers in the office of the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who narrowed the candidates down to just nine. Oyer was then asked to draft a memo recommending those nine individuals for the restoration of their gun rights—a draft she submitted on Thursday.
She said:
“They sent it back to me saying, ‘We would like you to add Mel Gibson to this memo.’”
Oyer recalled that a January letter from Gibson’s lawyer addressed to two senior Justice Department officials was attached to the request. The letter, which noted that Gibson had recently attempted to purchase a gun but was denied due to his prior domestic violence conviction, argued for Gibson’s gun rights to be restored, citing his recent appointment by President Donald Trump.
This referred to an announcement made by Trump on social media two weeks earlier, naming Gibson and others as “special ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California.”
Several hours after Oyer recommended not restoring Gibson's gun rights, a senior Justice Department official reached out to her and "essentially explained to me that Mel Gibson has a personal relationship with President Trump and that should be sufficient basis for me to make a recommendation and that I would be wise to make the recommendation."
Oyer said:
“I literally did not sleep a wink that night because I understood that the position I was in was one that was going to either require me to compromise my strongly held views and ethics or would likely result in me losing my ability to participate in these conversations going forward.”
Later, two security officers watched her pack her belongings and escorted her out of the building.
Gibson was criticized—and the Trump administration is also being called out for its blatant abuse of power.
Oyer said she was told that restoring gun rights to this small initial group was intended as a first step toward a broader policy shift, one that would rewrite Justice Department regulations to more clearly grant the attorney general the power to reinstate those rights.
What alarmed her most, she said, was the push from senior officials to “automate” the process, removing the careful case-by-case review she believed was essential for such decisions.
She also noted that senior officials were eager to make a public announcement about restoring gun rights to the first batch of individuals with convictions. As of Monday evening, however, no such announcement had been made.
