Top DOJ Official Resigns After Attempted Reassignment

Corey Amundson, chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section, during a news conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Aug. 4, 2022. Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters

The man who led the U.S. Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section has resigned, according to a new letter.

Corey Amundson, who had been in charge of the section for years before the Trump administration recently reassigned him to work on immigration issues, has stepped down.

“I am honored and blessed to have served our country and this department for the last 23 years,” Amundson wrote in his letter to Acting Attorney General James McHenry.

“I spent my entire professional life committed to the apolitical enforcement of the federal criminal law and to ensuring that those around me understood and embraced that central tenet of our work.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) did not respond to a request for comment.

Amundson started working for the DOJ out of Louisiana in 2002, according to his LinkedIn profile. He shifted to Washington about 10 years ago.

The profile lists his experience with the DOJ as ending in 2025.

Amundson was tapped in 2019 during Trump’s first term to become chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section. That put him in charge of overseeing public corruption and other politically sensitive investigations.

Amundson is one of an estimated 20 career officials inside the DOJ to be reassigned to a new Sanctuary City Working Group inside the associate attorney general’s office.

At least two of those officials, Amundson and George Toscas from the National Security Division, had some involvement in the two criminal investigations against Trump.

Former special counsel Jack Smith said in his final report that his team “consulted regularly” with the Public Integrity Section on topics such as serving subpoenas, bringing election fraud charges, and a U.S. Constitution clause that provides immunity to members of Congress who are furthering legislative acts.

Amundson’s resignation letter did not make reference to his section’s role in the Trump cases.

However, it cited a number of other high-profile cases he helped oversee, including the public corruption cases against Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), and Fugees hip hop group member Prakazrel Michel.

The DOJ, in addition to the recent reassignments, recently fired a number of officials who worked on Smith’s team.

The reassignments and terminations have drawn scrutiny from Democrats, who expressed concern about the treatment of individuals they said were “excellent career prosecutors.”

The moves contradicted Trump’s “repeated pledges to maintain a merit-based system for government employment,” Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said in a letter to DOJ officials.

“By removing them from their positions in this hasty and unprincipled way, you have very likely violated longstanding federal laws,” they added later.

The DOJ has not responded to an inquiry about the letter.

Jacob Burg and Reuters contributed to this report.