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Denise Cheung has been a household name in Washington’s legal circles for decades. But the veteran federal prosecutor this week was catapulted to national notoriety after resigning for rejecting orders from superiors appointed by President Donald Trump.
After serving at the US Department of Justice for more than 24 years, the head of the criminal division at the powerful US attorney’s office in Washington on Tuesday quit after declining to open a probe into whether a federal agency had illegally awarded a contract during ex-President Joe Biden’s administration. The order had been issued by the office of the acting deputy attorney-general, Emil Bove.
In her resignation letter to Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed acting US attorney in Washington, Cheung said she had not found enough evidence to launch the investigation, while Martin insisted “there was sufficient evidence”. After refusing to move ahead because “I believed that I lacked the legal authority . . . You then asked for my resignation,” she wrote.
Cheung has become the latest symbol of resistance against an administration that has taken aim at federal prosecutors, laying off DoJ lawyers who worked on cases targeting Trump, pressuring others to launch or drop investigations and instructing the dismissal of “Biden Era” US attorneys.
Her departure comes after a string of Manhattan’s top prosecutors, including Danielle Sassoon, the Trump-appointed US acting attorney for the Southern District of New York, quit last week following an order from the government to drop the corruption prosecution of New York City mayor Eric Adams.
Transfers of power typically lead to some turnover at the DoJ, but it is less common for career prosecutors, who serve across administrations, to be ousted.
Cheung “is somebody who’s a real career person, who’s used to changes in policies. You don’t resign every four years if there’s a change in administration,” says Andrew Weissmann, who encountered her when he was FBI general counsel between 2011 and 2013. “To me it signifies that this was such a big deal that she could not stomach it because she thought it was either unethical or unlawful.”
The crackdown on lawyers, critics argue, risks turning the DoJ into the personal enforcement branch of a president who has pledged to seek retribution against opponents, including Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. DoJ leadership has denied there would be undue influence from the White House.
The US is facing a “transformation” from a country “trying to adhere to the rule of law” to one that “is much closer, if not an exact mirror of, countries like Hungary, Russia . . . that are real threats to the various forms of democracy that exist” elsewhere, says Weissmann.
But a DoJ spokesperson described Cheung’s resignation not as “an act of heroism — just a failure to follow chain of command”.
Bove says that the DoJ’s “shared fight” included “ending weaponised government” and that for “those who do not support our critical mission, I understand there are templates for resignation letters available on the websites of the New York Times and CNN.” The US attorney’s office in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1995, Cheung rose through the ranks of the US attorney’s office in Washington, one of the country’s most high-profile bureaus that handles cases ranging from public corruption and espionage to local crime. She went on to advise former attorneys-general Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch on areas including counterterrorism and cyber security.
“Her career spans doing the tough, gritty job of prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, to advising the attorney-general on some of the most politically sensitive national security and white-collar matters that the DoJ handles,” says Howard Sklamberg, a partner at Arnold & Porter who previously worked with Cheung. “There are not that many prosecutors who can be switch-hitters that way.”
Washington’s legal insiders describe Cheung as well respected — a by-the-book prosecutor who, unlike many in the capital, does not chase the limelight. “She is a person of incredibly high integrity,” says Sklamberg, who was also in Cheung’s Harvard graduating class. “If you asked me to list 100 prosecutors that someone might criticise for having a political bias, she wouldn’t even be close to being on that list.”
In her resignation letter, Cheung said she remained “committed to the oath that I took . . . I know that all of the AUSAs [assistant United States attorneys] in the Office will continue to uphold that pledge they have taken, following the facts and the law and complying with their moral, ethical, and legal obligations.”
Her move has intensified an already fraught political debate in Washington. Democratic senators including Bernie Sanders and Edward Markey on Wednesday sent the DoJ’s inspector-general a letter asking to open an investigation into her resignation. “The integrity of our justice system depends on the independence of prosecutors and their ability to enforce the law free from political influence,” they said.
But beyond all the clamour, Sklamberg simply felt “sorrow” upon learning of Cheung’s departure. “She’s an incredibly talented person . . . Losing her as a public servant is a great loss.”
