Navigating Ethics as a Government Lawyer

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.

“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.)