DHS employee killed while walking her dog in Atlanta shooting spree
The seal of the Department of Homeland Security (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
(ATLANTA) — A Department of Homeland Security employee was “brutally shot and stabbed to death,” Monday, according to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in a shooting spree across the Atlanta area, in which one other person was killed and a third is in critical condition.
Lauren Bullis was walking her dog on Monday, when she was randomly attacked, allegedly stabbed and shot by Olaolukitan Adon Abel, a 26-year-old born in the United Kingdom who was naturalized in 2022, Mullin said.
“He possesses a prior criminal record that includes convictions for sexual battery, battery against a police officer, obstruction, and assault with a deadly weapon, vandalism and now stands accused of murdering @DHSgov employee Lauren Bullis by shooting and stabbing her while she walked her dog,” Mullin wrote on X.
Mullin said Abel was arrested for reportedly shooting a woman to death outside a restaurant before “randomly shooting a homeless man multiple times” outside a supermarket. ABC affiliate WSB reported that man is in critical condition.
Police said Abel, 26, shot and stabbed Burris about four hours later, according to WSB.
Police raided a home that the suspect rented near where Burris was attacked and arrested Abel, WSB reported, who faces at least six charges, including murder, aggravated assault and possession of a gun as a convicted felon.
Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff for policy, walks on the South Lawn of the White House after arriving on Marine One in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. US President Donald Trump threw his support behind a legislative proposal that would expand sales of higher-ethanol E15 gasoline as he looked to build support for his economic record with a crowd that included farmers in Iowa. (Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Over the weekend, the former chief of staff of the Justice Department — who was one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top advisers during her first seven months on the job — issued a public call for lawyers who “support President Trump” to join the Justice Department’s ranks.
In a post on X, the former chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, seemed to suggest he could help such applicants become career federal prosecutors — who by law are supposed to be apolitical.
“DM me,” Mizelle wrote, referring to direct messages sent privately to him. “We need good prosecutors.”
Forty minutes later, one of President Donald Trump’s top policy advisers, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, reposted Mizelle’s message, adding, “Patriots needed.” And then on Monday, the current U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Jason Reding Quinones, also reposted Mizelle’s message, saying, “We are hiring!”
There are political appointees within the Justice Department, including certain leaders based in Washington and the U.S. attorneys who oversee offices around the country — but the assistant U.S. attorneys, or AUSAs, who investigate and prosecute cases in those offices are supposed to be nonpolitical and nonpartisan.
Appearing on a conservative podcast on Monday, Mizelle said he has received “hundreds and hundreds of inquiries already” from lawyers looking to become AUSAs. But his posting, and the subsequent promotion of it by current senior government officials, has roiled some former federal prosecutors on both sides of the political spectrum.
“We shouldn’t have a favorite politician in the Justice Department; we should have a favorite document, and that’s the Constitution,” former prosecutor Perry Carbone told ABC News.
Carbone, who spent more than three decades as a federal prosecutor and until May was the chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, said that Mizelle’s post has “generated a lot of discussion” among former federal prosecutors, who are concerned about its implications.
“It’s dangerous,” he said of what the post could mean. “The day that Department of Justice lawyers are hired based on loyalty to a person … is the day the rest of us should get very nervous.”
He said the message in Mizelle’s post — and the reposts by Reding Quinones and Miller — “flatly contradict” federal laws and regulations pertaining to the hiring of career federal employees.
He cited federal laws, including the Civil Service Reform Act, that specifically prohibit favoring or discriminating against applicants for federal civil-service jobs based on their “political affiliation.”
“The law is very clear,” Carbone said.
He also cited the Justice Department’s own manual, which says, “All personnel decisions regarding career positions in the Department must be made without regard to the applicant’s or occupant’s partisan affiliation.”
“Efforts to influence personnel decisions concerning career positions on partisan grounds should be reported to the Deputy Attorney General,” the manual states.
Andy McCarthy, a conservative commentator and frequent Trump critic who himself served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York for nearly two decades, also blasted Mizelle’s post.
“If support for [the current] president is now a condition of enforcing federal law, Congress should defund DOJ. DOJ should only exist if it’s nonpartisan. Too dangerous to liberty otherwise,” McCarthy wrote.
“If AG Garland’s office had posted this, MAGA & GOP would be calling for impeachment,” he added, referring to Merrick Garland, the Biden administration’s attorney general.
Appearing on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast Monday, Mizelle defended his post, saying that Article II of the Constitution explicitly states that “all executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States,” so “any time an executive branch officer is using executive power — an AUSA indicting somebody or … bringing criminal evidence against somebody — all of that is executive power that’s included.”
Mizelle said that when he was working for Bondi last year, his “job as chief of staff” was to “root out a lot of this stuff,” so, “On Day 1 we dismissed about 100 people who we thought were working against Donald J. Trump,” and then “thousands” more left.
“That’s how government should work. It should work that if you can’t follow the wishes of the duly elected president of the United States, then you need to leave. And all we’re looking for now are people who want to follow his agenda,” Mizelle said.
But Carbone said he rejects Mizelle’s analysis of the Constitution and the work of federal prosecutors under changing administrations. While policies may change, prosecutors “have to exercise independent professional judgment, not political obedience,” he said.
That’s underscored by a 2008 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general, who launched an investigation at the time into allegations that the Justice Department under President George W. Bush had been improperly using political affiliations to screen candidates for an apolitical summer internship program and a program that hired recent law graduates without prior legal experience.
In his report, the inspector general noted that “both DOJ policy and civil service law prohibit discrimination in hiring for DOJ career positions on the basis of political affiliations,” and said courts have considered “political affiliation” to include “commonality of political purpose, partisan activity, and political support.”
After his office’s investigation, the inspector general concluded that two political appointees in the department “took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law.”
As for Mizelle’s recent post, Carbone said it is “just another symptom” afflicting a Justice Department that “has been building this reputation of independence for 50 years, since Watergate, and now here we are in a place where we’ve taken a giant step back.”
Mark Rotert, an AUSA in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago during the 1980s and 1990s, who was also on his office’s hiring committee, agreed, calling Mizelle’s post “disgraceful.”
“It never would have occurred to us to explore what the candidate’s views were about the president, or what kind of job the president is doing,” Rotert said of his time on the hiring committee. “Partisan politics were never considered a relevant or even an appropriate discussion point.”
Carbone also said that while Mizelle may not work at the Justice Department anymore, the boost it received from Miller, a senior White House official, and Reding Quinones, a U.S. attorney, shows how connected Mizelle still is — or at the least how his message “is supported by high-level people in the Justice Department.”
Mizelle’s post comes as the Justice Department faces increasing pressure over its handling of a wide array of politically charged matters, including firing prosecutors and investigators who were involved in previous Trump-related investigations; filing federal charges against or otherwise investigating many of President Trump’s political enemies; failing to initially investigate the officer who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis last month; and most recently last week’s FBI seizure of ballots and other records related to the 2020 election from an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a message from ABC News seeking comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida also did not respond to a message seeking comment from ABC News.
Lindsey Halligan, attorney for Donald Trump, looks on during an executive order signing in the Oval Office of the White House, on March 31, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Al Drago/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — In an 11-page court filing, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Acting U.S. attorney Lindsay Halligan blasted a federal judge Tuesday for what they called an “inquisition” against Halligan for continuing to represent herself as U.S. attorney for Eastern District of Virginia, after another judge found she was not legally allowed to serve in the role.
Halligan, a former White House aide who was appointed interim U.S. attorney by President Donald Trump, secured indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, only to have them thrown out when U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie determined in November that she had been unlawfully appointed without being either Senate confirmed or appointed by the federal judiciary.
Last week, U.S. District Judge David Novak ordered the Justice Department to explain why Halligan was still using the title after her office issued an indictment in which she was identified as U.S. attorney in the document’s signature block.
In their court filing on Tuesday, Bondi, Blanche and Halligan slammed Judge Novak’s order.
“The Court’s thinly veiled threat to use attorney discipline to cudgel the Executive Branch into conforming its legal position in all criminal prosecutions to the views of a single district judge is a gross abuse of power and an affront to the separation of powers,” the filing said. “The bottom line is that Ms. Halligan has not ‘misrepresented’ anything and the Court is flat wrong to suggest that any change to the Government’s signature block is warranted in this or any other case.”
“Contrary to this Court’s suggestion, nothing in the Comey and James dismissal orders prohibits Ms. Halligan from performing the functions of or holding herself out as the United States Attorney,” said the filing. “Although Judge Currie concluded that Ms. Halligan was unlawfully appointed under Section 546, she did not purport to enjoin Ms. Halligan from continuing to oversee the office or from identifying herself as the United States Attorney in the Government’s signature blocks.”
The DOJ officials said Judge Novak had a “fixation” on Halligan’s signature block, which was “untethered from how federal courts actually operate.”
They argued that the court has no authority to strike her signature from the block.
U.S. President Donald Trump answers questions during a press briefing held at the White House February 20, 2026 in Washington, DC. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The federal judge who tossed then-special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case against President Donald Trump has permanently barred the release of Smith’s final report on his probe.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in 2024 after deciding that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unlawful, then blocked the release of the Smith’s report on his investigation.
She ruled Monday that the report should be sealed for good, after Trump and his co-defendants in the case sought a court order barring the report’s release.
The public release of the report “would contravene the conclusions in the Court’s final Dismissal Order that Special Counsel Smith acted without lawful appointment or funding authority in this proceeding and that his actions taken in connection herewith are therefore invalid,” Cannon’s order said.
Cannon, a Trump appointee, also scolded Smith for preparing the report in the first place even though she had ruled his appointment was unlawful, calling it a “concerning breach of the spirit of the Dismissal Order.”
“Nevertheless, rather than seek a stay of the Order, or clarification, Special Counsel Smith and his team chose to circumvent it, for months, by taking the discovery generated in this case and compiling it in a final report for transmission to then-Attorney General Garland, to Congress, and then beyond,” Cannon wrote in her order.
“The Court need not countenance this brazen stratagem or effectively perpetuate the Special Counsel’s breach of this Court’s own order,” she wrote.
Trump pleaded not guilty in June 2023 to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving the White House in 2021, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information and took steps to thwart the government’s efforts to get the documents back. Trump asserted that he had every right to possess the documents.
Smith, testifying publicly before the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee last month, said his investigation “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity” — and that partisan politics did not play a role in his decision to charge Trump.
