A lawyer who worked closely with Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder now works in President Donald Trump’s administration as an ostensibly nonpolitical staffer at the Justice Department.
While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in purportedly nonpolitical, career positions. The Office of Personnel Management tracks when political appointees transition to career positions—a process often referred to as “burrowing in” to the bureaucracy—and Tina Thomas did so in August 2024.
Biden appointed Thomas as a political appointee in September 2021 to serve as senior counsel in the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department. She transitioned to a career role as assistant U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., also in the Justice Department. OPM approved the transition on Aug. 11. Thomas went from an annual salary of $110,460 to $121,435.
According to her verified LinkedIn profile, Thomas graduated from Yale University in 2009 and from Yale Law School in 2014.
After law school, she joined the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals for a year before joining the law firm Covington & Burling, where she worked as a senior associate in white collar defense and as adviser to Holder. She worked there from November 2015 to September 2021.
Her LinkedIn profile states that she “served as a strategic adviser and counselor to the Hon. Eric H. Holder, Jr., 82nd Attorney General of the United States, on his firm-related and personal matters, including his work with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, speeches and op-eds, and client development at Covington & Burling.”
While Thomas’ role advising Holder sounds prestigious, it may set off alarm bells in the new administration.
Eric Holder
Holder may be most notorious for refusing to hand over records from the gun-running scheme code named “Operation Fast and Furious,” which led to him becoming the first Cabinet official to be held in contempt of Congress. However, perhaps the greatest gulf between his approach to the law and that of the current administration involves race.
Conservative classicist and commentator Victor Davis Hanson, a Daily Signal contributor, claimed Holder’s key legacy involved “re-teaching Americans to think of race as essential, not incidental, to our characters.”
Early in his tenure as attorney general, Holder called America a “nation of cowards” for supposedly failing to “confront our racial past and to understand our racial present.” He said Americans “simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.” Holder took public stances on the fatal shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown before all the facts were known in those cases, breathing more oxygen into the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a 2014 speech, Holder condemned policies that he said have “the appearance of being race-neutral” but have racial impacts. He claimed such policies “impede equal opportunity in fact, if not in form.” He noted that while “overt” race-based restrictions on the right to vote “cannot survive,” “new types of restrictions are justified as attempts to curb an epidemic of voter fraud that, in reality, has never been shown to exist.” He claimed these policies “disproportionately disenfranchise African-Americans, Hispanics, other communities of color and vulnerable populations such as the elderly.”
He noted that “Chief Justice John Roberts has argued that the path to ending racial discrimination is to give less consideration to the issue of race altogether,” but he argued that “this presupposes that racial discrimination is at a sufficiently low ebb that it doesn’t need to be actively confronted.”
Under Holder, the DOJ investigated police departments, issued official findings that the departments engage in racial discrimination, filed lawsuits, and forced the departments to agree to a “consent decree” as part of settling that lawsuit. These consent decrees require a change in the department’s culture to satisfy the DOJ and the court.
Holder also reportedly directed the Justice Department to drop a voter intimidation case involving members of the New Black Panther Party reportedly wielded a club outside a polling place in Philadelphia in the 2008 election.
The second Trump administration has fought the kind of racial rhetoric and policy Holder encouraged. Trump ordered the termination of all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “equity” programs across the federal government, which had implemented the idea that America is a systemically racist society in need of fundamental reform.
Thomas’ Work With Holder
Holder resigned as attorney general in 2015, but he remained active, particularly on the issue of redistricting. State legislatures draw maps determining congressional districts for elections to the U.S. House of Representatives. Holder blocked redistricting plans in several states, claiming they would dilute the voting strength of racial minorities. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allowed the DOJ to block redistricting practices if it found them discriminatory, a practice Holder repeatedly used.
Holder’s DOJ also brought legal action against a Texas law requiring valid ID to vote, claiming that it was racially discriminatory.
In 2016, Holder became the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a political organization created to challenge maps and help Democrat candidates obtain majorities in the U.S. Congress ahead of the 2020 census. The committee claims that Republicans “seized control of the redistricting process” by “disenfranchising voters, especially Democrats and people of color.”
Thomas notably mentioned working with Holder on the National Democratic Redistricting Committee in her LinkedIn biography.
Both her LinkedIn biography and her Covington & Burling profile mention Thomas’ pro bono work advising the National Redistricting Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit aligned with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, “on litigation to challenge partisan and racial gerrymanders.”
In other words, she worked closely with Holder’s redistricting efforts both on and off the clock.
Deep State Opposition
A March poll found that 75% of Washington, D.C.-based federal employees making $75,000 or more per year who voted for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November said they would not follow a lawful Trump order if they considered it bad policy.
While some political appointees who took “career” positions may faithfully work for the U.S. government under any president, this poll suggests that some staff inside the federal government may work against the goals of the current president, in this case Trump.
Furthermore, a February Foundation for Government Accountability study found that Democrat employees outnumber Republican employees by a 2-to-1 margin across federal agencies. In the 2024 presidential election, 84% of the money that federal employees gave in political contributions went to Harris.
Federal workers enjoy workplace protections that make them very difficult to fire. The new administration is seeking to reform these rules to enable the president to fulfill his duties as head of the executive branch without facing opposition from hostile bureaucrats.
The Daily Signal reached out to Thomas, Covington & Burling, the National Redistricting Committee, and the Justice Department for comment. None responded by publication time.
This is the latest in a series on bureaucrats burrowing in. Part one covers eight appointees. Part two focuses on a former Russiagate adviser who works at the Federal Aviation Administration. Parts three and five expose a former lawyer for then-Sen. Kamala Harris who advised Harris during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and who now works at the Defense Department. Part four focuses on a former Biden campaign lawyer who now works at the Justice Department. Part six highlights a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who failed to get reconfirmed, “burrowed in” at the Department of Energy, and took the buyout.
