Growing up, Brad Weinsheimer thought it sounded inspiring if he could one day stand in court and say, “I’m Brad Weinsheimer on behalf of the United States.” He eventually did just that. When he left the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2025, he had spent over 34 years as a government lawyer—the last seven as associate deputy attorney general and DOJ’s senior career official, where he was tasked, among other responsibilities, with making decisions and recommendations over DOJ’s thorniest ethical problems. Attorney professional misconduct allegations and recusals for DOJ’s most senior attorneys, complaints in sensitive investigations, problematic conflicts of interest—all flowed to him.
“You’re considered the conscience of the department,” says Weinsheimer, “so people trust that you’re going to make the decision that supports what the institution is supposed to be doing.” Across more than three decades, Weinsheimer worked across seven presidential administrations and under 12 attorneys general—but he was always working on behalf of the United States.
In this issue, we examine the tension between moral agency and professional ethics. For career public servants who work across multiple administrations, this tension can be particularly acute. In Canceling Lawyers, W. Bradley Wendel tackles what happens when lawyers represent unpopular clients. But how do government lawyers handle this tension when their client is the United States and when leadership and policy changes? And what about when your job itself is ethics?
Process prevents missteps
Weinsheimer started his career in the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office. As a prosecutor, he saw only a “small sliver of ethics decisions,” mostly related to his responsibilities in courtrooms and investigations. “What can I say or not say in an opening argument? What can I say or not say in a closing argument? What are the investigative tools that I have available to me? What are my discovery and disclosure obligations? I want to make sure I’m not abusing my authority,” he explains. After two decades as a trial lawyer and supervisor with the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, Weinsheimer had a sound understanding of what allegations of professional misconduct looked like—as they often arise in the context of trials and investigations—and thought he could make a difference in another DOJ component.
In 2011 he was appointed the Deputy Counsel in DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), the office responsible for making sure DOJ lawyers are meeting their professional responsibilities and obligations. Weinsheimer believed his work at OPR should go beyond holding those who engage in misconduct accountable and should encompass identifying how and why professional misconduct occurs so that it can be prevented and avoided in the first place. “If I had some goal at OPR, it would be, I’d like to put us out of work—that would be to everybody’s interest,” Weinsheimer says. Figure out what people are doing wrong and why and put enough processes and accountability measures in place to stop it, he thought. Standards, rules, training, and documentation were critical to this mission.
“I’m not going to say that there aren’t people who knowingly engage in professional misconduct, because there are, but I think equally and far more often, it’s people acting in good faith who made mistakes or didn’t understand their obligations,” Weinsheimer says. At OPR and later as DOJ’s senior career official, Weinsheimer made it his mission to build uniform practices, working with the criminal chief’s working group (a subcommittee of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of United States Attorneys) to look at trends and spot common errors. He found sometimes mistakes would happen with “simple things like how you documented a witness interview or where you put those records or whether you routinely, as a matter of course, ordered grand jury transcripts or whether you waited for trial.” While “bureaucracy” often receives a bad reputation for being cumbersome and difficult, the procedures it provides also offer consistency and checks—all the more important for nonpartisan civil servants who span administrations.
You’re considered the conscience of the department [as the senior career official].
Brad Weinsheimer, former associate deputy attorney general and senior career official, U.S. Department of Justice
“I think where people run into ethics problems, there’s often competing interests. You’re trying to accomplish something important and you cut a corner or you didn’t know of a related responsibility, or you were doing the right thing but for the wrong reason or in the wrong way,” he says. “And that’s where the problem comes up. If you can help people figure out what are the best practices and make sure they are well trained on their responsibilities, then you’re helping everybody, including those who are under investigation by the department.”
At OPR, Weinsheimer was fairly insulated from presidential administration changes as the office operated with independence (for good reason). As he moved up to his role as associate deputy attorney general (with a brief stop in the National Security Division), however, he began to feel those changes more, with caveats.
“As the senior career official, I felt a little bit of that [changes when administrations changed], but the key importance to the position is its responsibility for institutional knowledge and keeping the department honest and true to its fundamental principles, and that really shouldn’t change from administration to administration.”
A role that “tells truth to power”
“When I took over the job [as senior career official], my predecessor told me, ‘You are going to be better at this job each day because of what happened yesterday, because the same thing tends not to happen over and over again.’ If it did, we would do things to make that stop happening,” Weinsheimer says.
Weinsheimer was only the third career attorney to take the role of senior-most career official, when he was promoted to the position in 2018. Much of his routine work was related to department policy. For instance, he spent two years in the position leading a working group analyzing DOJ sexual misconduct and harassment policies to update them with victim-centered and trauma-informed guidance and policy that would prevent misconduct from occurring, protect victims, and hold offenders accountable. He also routinely dealt with U.S. attorney recusals or permissions around speech engagements and served as agency counsel before congressional committees when senior Department officials were interviewed in congressional investigations touching on DOJ’s work.
As an associate deputy attorney general, Weinsheimer also had delegated authority from the deputy attorney general on ethics issues—which meant bigger issues came to him. He dealt with thorny issues in special counsel and other sensitive investigations, especially when those investigations resulted in charges or were nearing a conclusion. When Special Counsel Robert Hur submitted his report at the conclusion of his investigation into President Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, Hur called President Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” In a letter to the Attorney General, the White House Counsel and counsel for President Biden objected to the characterization as “unnecessary, inflammatory, and prejudicial.” Weinsheimer was called in to rule on whether Hur’s report followed proper procedure and department policy and to respond to the complaint. (Much of Weinsheimer’s work remains confidential, but certain events are public because of Freedom of Information Act requests, including this.)
Our integrity is one of the most important things we have.
Brad Weinsheimer
“The fact is Rob Hur said what he said in the context of explaining what his decision was. So it wasn’t gratuitous. This was a report he was required to give the Attorney General explaining his decision-making. Because it was in that context, I believed it was appropriate for the department to say it,” Weinsheimer says. He continues: “Part of the job is protecting the institution so that it’s not the Attorney General who’s in the position of engaging with counsel on a complaint in a high-profile, politically charged investigation. It’s the senior career official who works on these issues, who’s trying to protect the institution by making sure that policy gets applied evenly and fairly.” In other words, because Weinsheimer was not a political appointee but the most senior career official, there can be little question of political motivation.
Weinsheimer notes the role’s importance to DOJ by emphasizing the position’s unique responsibility: “You’re in a position to tell truth to power.”
Staying far from the line
When difficult issues did make their way to Weinsheimer, a combination of proper process, attention to norms, and dedication to the mission and integrity of the department helped him arrive at a decision.
“There’s a general philosophy that on ethics decisions, we don’t want to be close to the line,” says Weinsheimer. “Our integrity is one of the most important things we have.”
Norms are one critical guide for government lawyers, says Weinsheimer. “I think if you look at the three most important norms of the Department of Justice, there’s a norm for independence, for principled decision-making, and for treating like cases alike.” DOJ’s independence from politics is a particularly important one. Weinsheimer references a 1940 speech from former attorney general and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who warned that the “most dangerous power of the prosecutor” is “that he will pick the man, then pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” According to Weinsheimer, principled discretion, embodied in DOJ’s Principles of Federal Prosecution, and the norm of treating like cases alike further ensure DOJ is acting properly—and justly. “We investigate allegations of criminal conduct, not people,” says Weinsheimer, “and when we start to investigate people, that’s where we get into trouble. There’s all sorts of things where it might be legal, but that doesn’t mean we should do it.”
Weinsheimer emphasizes that discretion is one of the “strongest tools in the toolbox of a prosecutor,” and “norms are what makes sure that we don’t come close to the line of selective or vindictive prosecution and violating due process.” With Weinsheimer’s two decades in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he understood the moral burden and authority of prosecutorial discretion.
While President Trump has suggested that he could tell the DOJ which investigations to take on and which to steer clear of, Weinsheimer notes that while that might be legal, “typically, that has never happened before, at least not since the Watergate era. And the reason it’s never happened before is there’s a norm of independence that protects due process and equal treatment under law,” says Weinsheimer.
Weinsheimer thinks a lot about a couple of historical touchstones that have served him well from his time as a prosecutor through to his senior role in DOJ, in addition to Jackson’s speech. First, he relays the words of Justice Sutherland, who wrote in Berger v. United States, in Weinsheimer’s paraphrase: “You don’t represent an ordinary client but the United States, and your job is not to win a case but to make sure that justice is done.” Weinsheimer also thinks of a line from Frederick Lehmann, Taft’s solicitor general, which is inscribed in the rotunda outside the Attorney General’s Office: “The United States wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in the courts.” Thinking across his career as a government attorney, this was indelible to Weinsheimer’s sense of his role. “Look, my job is not that the United States wins the case. It’s to do justice,” he says. “And if that happens, then I win my point.”
The tension between personal and professional morality
Weinsheimer’s sense of justice—and the United States as client—was an integral stabilizing force as administrations, policy, and priorities shifted.
In today’s political climate, however, Weinsheimer feels a shift. “Until recently, it didn’t really change who your client was [when administrations shifted]. Now the argument is being made essentially that the president is your client—with the unitary executive theory, the president is the executive branch, so whatever the president wants and says, that’s what you should do because that’s who your client is, which is a different way of thinking about it than the way we’ve thought about it in the past.”
Prior to today, Weinsheimer says that he has rarely felt his own personal sense of morality buck up against his job as a government lawyer—even when he might personally not agree with a particular course of action. For instance, when he was chief of the superior court division in the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, he had a disagreement with the U.S. attorney on a particular statute, so much so that he explained, “I can’t do that, nor am I going to have any of my people do that, because I don’t think it’s right. If I’m the person who has to do it, then I’m going to have to resign my position.” The situation ended up resolving itself so he did not have to resign, and this was the exception, not the norm.
We’re going to act in good faith, and sometimes things are going to happen that I don’t think should, but my job, and what’s expected of me, is to do the right thing every day.
Brad Weinsheimer
Throughout his career, there were times where department lawyers disagreed with the cases they were asked to support. Such lawyers would either leave or the case would be reassigned—if someone cannot zealously advocate for the case, then maybe they’re not the right person for that case, Weinsheimer says. Still, he says, “if person after person says, ‘There isn’t evidence to support this’ [or] ‘We can’t do this. This isn’t legal,’ we should be questioning whether it’s the right thing to do.” He continues:
Obviously, you get to some points where, OK, you know what? This is insubordination because you’re not the client. You don’t get to decide what’s right in every case from that standpoint. But that happens so very rarely because the DNA of the department is behind this theory that whenever justice is done its citizens in court, then we win.
Doing the right thing
Career civil servants are necessary to ensure the stability of the government, even as there are often large shifts in the federal workforce every four or eight years. Weinsheimer served as the “conscience of the department” by combining a deep institutional knowledge, an engrained sense of mission, and a thorough understanding of policy—a blend that could be achieved only through years of experience and time on task.
“I’ve always felt the best part of being a Department of Justice lawyer is that I get to do the right thing every day,” Weinsheimer says. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to make mistakes. We are all human. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to act in good faith, and sometimes things are going to happen that I don’t think should, but my job, and what’s expected of me, is to do the right thing every day.” For Weinsheimer, as for Lehmann, that thing is to do justice.
