Top Justice Department Official Resigns as Rats Begin Jumping

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is leaving the Trump administration. Fox News reports that Dhillon resigned Thursday following Democrats’ landslide victory in the midterm elections. She reportedly told allies that she planned to leave after the elections, according to Bloomberg Law.Dhillon is the first top official to leave the Trump administration following the election. She overhauled her division at the DOJ to actually weaken civil rights, and on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, said, “Either DEI will end on its own or we will kill it.” She also staffed the civil rights office with the worst lawyers, including people with criminal records, misconduct allegations, a love of conspiracy theories, and a history of hacking election sites. Dhillon also led a sweeping campaign to force states to turn over sensitive voter information, a crusade repeatedly shut down in court.In September, Dhillon proudly announced that the DOJ had dropped more than 50 desegregation cases, most of which were in Southern states with Jim Crow histories. On her watch, the office focuses on everything but civil rights, looking at election rolls, immigration, and alleged antisemitism on college campuses.Dhillon’s departure could be the first sign of people fleeing a highly unpopular, lame-duck administration. Others could be fired, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom Trump has been considering giving the axe. White House adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller has plenty of enemies upset that his hard-line immigration policies made Republicans massively unpopular. The MAGA movement’s Tuesday bloodbath has already inspired some of the far-right contingent’s biggest figureheads to plot a course without Donald Trump.Secretary of State Marco Rubio is preparing to resign from the Trump administration as he lays the groundwork for a potential 2028 presidential campaign, The Independent reported Thursday.Insiders in Washington and the British government told the newspaper that Rubio needs to distance himself from Trump’s controversies—including the wildly unpopular war in Iran—to improve his odds at the ballot box.The news would be a major snub to Vice President JD Vance, who has been teasing his own presidential bid for months and has long been viewed as Trump’s only clear successor. Both the White House and the State Department refuted reports of Rubio’s forthcoming exit, telling the Independent that the allegations were “baseless.” But the possible Republican challenge may not have come as a surprise to Trump himself, who speculated to reporters Wednesday that “maybe [Vance] won’t run.”“We’ll see what happens. Everybody—You don’t know who’s talking about running. You could have a lot of people, maybe a lot of people running, maybe nobody is gonna run. Maybe he won’t run. I don’t know who’s going to run,” Trump said, before adding that he “wouldn’t have done nothing different” regarding the Iran war.If Rubio does decide to leave, he will leave behind a shattered and broken White House that is on the cusp of losing even more Cabinet members as Trump looks for places to lay blame for his shoddy second term. Last month, Trump reportedly called several close confidantes to assess the potential of using White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, his former campaign manager and famed “Ice Maiden,” as a scapegoat for a major midterm bust. He’s also made the rounds to check current attitudes about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine as the Iran war drags on into its eighth month.But even more heads could roll after January, when Democrats retake both chambers of Congress. Liberal party leaders indicated Thursday that they plan to make Washington a very different place in the new year. Some Republicans seem to be in agreement: Representative Thomas Massie plans to resurrect his articles of impeachment against Hegseth, and several members of the GOP believe it will pass.Read more about 2028 contenders:Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t need a blue wave to knock him out of office—Republicans are already pissed enough on their own. Outgoing Representative Thomas Massie told CNN Wednesday that he plans to trigger a vote to impeach Hegseth when Congress returns next week. Multiple GOP sources said they expect the measure to pass. Massie introduced his impeachment articles in mid-September as a privileged resolution, requiring the House to vote on it within two days. House Speaker Mike Johnson called an early campaign-season recess in order to kill the measure, but Massie told a reporter that he’d take up the effort after the midterm elections. Following previous reporting that Donald Trump intended to oust Hegseth as the fall guy for the Republicans disastrous midterm elections, the president told ABC News Thursday that he had “every intention to keep him.”Massie had his own response. “If Trump’s going to replace appointees like Hegseth, he should do it while he can still get the replacements confirmed in the Senate,” he wrote on X Thursday. “Also, my Hegseth impeachment resolution is a much gentler version of what’s coming when Dem’s control Congress. They’ll have hearings & trials.”The previous evening, Massie had warned, “There is one contingency in which I won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment: Hegseth resigns.” While House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has suggested that Democrats are not interested in “getting even” with Republicans, he indicated Thursday that the Defense secretary would be a potential target when he became House Speaker. “Why is Pete Hegseth still around?” Jeffries wrote on X. Donald Trump is trying to rig another election.The president suggested making an eyebrow-raising change to the Alaska Senate race, writing on Truth Social on Thursday that the votes cast for independent candidate Dan J. Sullivan Jr. should be tacked on to the vote count for incumbent Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan.“The vote totals for the Fake Dan Sullivan, plus the other ‘slug’ that the Dems put on the Ballot, should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over—He easily wins,” Trump wrote. “There is no other fair solution!”Sullivan is currently neck and neck in the Alaska race with his Democratic opponent, Mary Peltola. As of the time of publication, Peltola has 48.17 percent of the vote, while Sullivan has 47.88 percent. Sullivan Jr., meanwhile, has 1.68 percent of the vote. Combining the results for the two Sullivans would squeeze the Republican ahead of Peltola, though actually doing so would violate the law.Alaska is still tabulating its votes, however: Just 74 percent of the Last Frontier has reported its Election Day results. The state also uses ranked-choice voting, meaning it could take longer to count the rankings, as well.Whether Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher, decided to enter the midterms by his own accord is currently in doubt. The New York Times reported last week that he was recruited by individuals connected to Peltola’s campaign. On Saturday, CBS News reported that the political independent had left his hometown and flown to Anchorage. In his own words, Sullivan wrote on Facebook in June that he entered this race because he was “unhappy with the 12 year record of the current Senator” and felt that “we need a change.”“It’s that simple,” he said.Republicans didn’t buy it. Party leaders have since accused Democrats of election fraud and of attempting to brew confusion about the ballot ahead of Election Day. Alaskans, in turn, have argued that they’re not confused by the situation at all. One Anchorage resident told CNN last week that the controversy had not shaken his vote, informing the network that you can “absolutely” tell who’s who on the ballot.“And I don’t even have my glasses on,” he quipped. “It’s pretty clear. It’s in black and white.”But the Trump administration is still trying to change the record. In other panicked missives, Trump has called for criminal prosecution of Peltola, and directed the Justice Department to sue Alaska and its election officials in a flagrant attempt to block the certification of the vote if the Republican Sullivan loses. The DOJ has already issued letters to a number of prominent Democrats informing them that they may be targets of a federal investigation.Read more about the elections:Democrat James Talarico didn’t just win big in Texas’s Senate race—he won before Election Day. According to data from the Texas secretary of state’s office, Talarico got 4,397,474 votes in early voting—more than the 4,249,373 votes that his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General James Paxton, received overall. While the election results have not been certified by the state of Texas yet, all 5,303 polling locations and 254 counties in the state were reporting results, according to the secretary of state’s website.Texas Secretary of StateThe total margin of victory stands at 55 percent for Talarico versus 43 percent for Paxton, greater than the 50–43 margin the last poll predicted before the election. Texas has a 12-day early voting period, and it shattered its own turnout records, with 7.4 million Texans voting during that time.Talarico’s win was already historic, as he is the first Democrat elected to represent Texas in the Senate since 1988, when then-incumbent Lloyd Bentsen won reelection. But a win by 12 percentage points, in a state Trump won by 13.7 percentage points in 2024, shows just how unpopular Republicans were in these midterms.And Talarico was not the only Democrat to win in Texas: The party swept every statewide race, is on track to take over the state House, and flipped all four of the state Supreme Court seats that were on the ballot. Texans not only followed the rest of the country in punishing Republicans during these midterms, but they came out in large numbers early, and upended decades of GOP dominance.