# Elizabeth Oyer Career Justice Department attorney who served as U.S. Pardon Attorney from 2022 until her removal in March 2025. A former federal public defender and a career member of the Senior Executive Service, Oyer ran the office that administers the formal clemency track described in [[The Pardon and Clemency Pipeline]]. During her tenure the backlog of pending clemency applications was reduced from roughly 18,000 to roughly 3,000; more than 6,000 applications were pending on the day she was removed. Oyer has said publicly, and in testimony to congressional Democrats, that her removal followed her refusal to recommend restoring firearm rights to a well-known Trump acquaintance who had lost them following a domestic-violence conviction. She has described conditions at the department since 2025 as a "five-alarm fire." She sued the Justice Department and Attorney General [[Todd Blanche]] seeking reinstatement, arguing that the removal lacked cause, notice, and the procedural protections owed a career SES employee; by September 2026 she was arguing to the court that the Merit Systems Protection Board offered no functioning remedy — the same jurisdictional dead end that recurs across the vault's 2025–26 removal cases. Her successor, [[Ed Martin]], departed the post in August 2026; the office had no publicly confirmed head as of September 11, 2026. **Status:** stub — expand with the litigation docket, the testimony record, and the clemency-policy record of her tenure. ## See also - [[The Pardon and Clemency Pipeline]] · [[Office of the Pardon Attorney]] - [[Ed Martin]] · [[Todd Blanche]] - [[Pardon Power]] · [[Pardons as Currency]] - [[Inspector General Oversight Tree]] — the parallel pattern of career-official removals