Justice Department national security chief John Eisenberg resigns, Blanche says

John Eisenberg, the assistant attorney general who led the Justice Department’s National Security Division, has resigned, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on Friday. Blanche made the announcement on X.

Blanche thanked Eisenberg for “strengthening our nation’s ability to address threats, both foreign and domestic.” According to Fox News, he added that under Eisenberg the division advanced President Donald Trump’s agenda by prosecuting terrorists and working with law enforcement partners to disrupt planned attacks. CBS News described the resignation as abrupt.

Third senior exit since the midterms

Fox News counted Eisenberg as the third senior department official to leave since the midterm elections. Less than an hour before his departure became public, Blanche had announced that Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, was also stepping down.

A day earlier, Harmeet Dhillon, who headed the Civil Rights Division, said she was leaving. She told Fox News Digital she had tried to resign three weeks earlier but that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles asked her to wait until the midterms were over. CBS News noted that Eisenberg’s exit came two days after Democrats won back control of the House of Representatives.

A quieter profile

CBS News reported that Eisenberg kept a lower profile than Dhillon, and that the division has lost a large number of career staff over the past year. Fox News said it was his second stint under Trump: in the first term he served as assistant and deputy counsel to the president and as a legal adviser to the National Security Council.

His division was handed an awkward assignment late last year, CBS News said: overseeing the redaction of investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, as Congress required. The job later grew to involve the FBI, the Criminal Division and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which together assigned 400 attorneys to review about 5.2 million pages. Epstein’s victims have complained that their names and personal details were released by mistake, and members of Congress have accused the department of improperly redacting information about possible unindicted co-conspirators.

What the division does

Set up several years after the 9/11 attacks, the National Security Division runs the department’s counterterrorism and counterintelligence work, enforces export controls and reviews foreign investment in American companies, CBS News said. Many national security cases brought by U.S. attorney’s offices around the country require its consultation, and sometimes its approval.

Since Trump returned to office in January, the division has been involved in some of the most prominent cases, CBS News reported, including leak investigations that have targeted journalists. One such case led to a raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson as part of an Espionage Act inquiry into a government contractor. The division was also central to changes in domestic terrorism investigations ordered by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose December directive told agencies and prosecutors to focus on antifa-linked and “extremist” groups and individuals.

This year the division helped bring the first case before the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a secretive immigration court that relies on classified evidence. The target, Nazira Haji Zada, agreed to be deported to Afghanistan rather than contest the allegations, according to CBS News.

What is unclear

Neither Fox News nor CBS News said who would take over the division or gave a reason for Eisenberg’s decision to leave.