Former Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates announced he’s resigned from the U.S. Department of Justice and will return to work for the city.
Gates posted his resignation letter to U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi on Facebook on Sunday, Nov. 9.
In the letter, dated Nov. 8, Gates said it was the “honor of a lifetime” to serve for the past 10 months as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Gates told the Register he was “very conflicted” about his decision to leave the DOJ to return to City Hall, where he has accepted an offer as chief assistant city attorney starting Nov. 24. He stepped down as the city’s elected city attorney to take the job in President Donald Trump’s administration.
But Gates said he missed his family.
“Being there was very, very difficult,” he said in an interview Monday morning, adding that he had missed out on his son’s varsity football games and his daughter’s surf events. “The 10 months in some ways — because of all the missing and yearning to be home — felt like 10 years at times.”
The opportunity to defend the city he’s represented for a decade was another big factor in his decision to leave D.C., Gates said. He was first elected as Huntington Beach’s city attorney in 2014 and won reelection twice more.
“I really am looking forward to this opportunity to come back and fight for the city,” Gates said. “There is so much value in what happens locally and even on the state level. The particular, and frankly, unique, battles Huntington Beach has been engaged in against the state, and how meaningful those can be, how high-impact those can be, I really did miss those.”
Gates said he will again run for city attorney in 2026. In the meantime, Gates said he expects to tackle legal challenges regarding Huntington Beach’s voter ID law and its at-large council election structure, among other issues.
“It’s really a perfect opportunity to come home and keep fighting for my city while there’s someone finishing out their term as city attorney,” Gates said, referring to Mike Vigliotta, who was appointed by the City Council in February after Gates left to join the Justice Department.
Gates said he’s especially proud of his work on election-related issues for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Gates was involved in the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page, alleging that Page did not turn over full records related to the removal of non-citizens from voter registration lists. Page, through attorneys, has maintained he followed state and federal law and could not give sensitive personal information of registrants without a subpoena or court order.
The lawsuit was among numerous challenges the Trump administration launched against multiple states as part of an effort to ensure they comply with federal requirements for maintaining voter rolls.
“That’s high impact to the nation,” Gates said. “If we go into the 2026 election with every state verifying clean voter rolls, that will actually have an impact on elections.”
Gates didn’t say whether his team had found widespread instances of people casting ballots illegally or erroneously. Instead, he said they found one smaller state had upwards of 40,000 people on its voter roll over the age of 100, and another state with 1 million duplicate voters on its roll.
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