A lawyer who worked for Kamala Harris’ Senate office and President Joe Biden’s National Security Council now works in President Donald Trump’s administration as an ostensibly non-political staffer in the Department of Defense, even though she wrote an op-ed calling Trump “unfit to hold office.”
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 ostensibly 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 Samantha Goldstein did so in 2023.
Goldstein went from senior counsel at the Office of Legal Policy in the Department of Justice to attorney-advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel in the DOJ.
OPM approved her move on Jan. 15, 2023. Goldstein received a pay bump from $110,460 annually to $127,942 annually.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Goldstein left the DOJ in July 2024 to serve as deputy legal advisor on Biden’s National Security Council until February, when she joined the Department of Defense as associate deputy general counsel.
Goldstein graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2013, and clerked for two U.S. appeals courts: the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. She interned with the left-leaning NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 2016 and served as a special counsel for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., in 2018. Between these two positions and before she joined the Justice Department, Goldstein worked at the firm O’Melveny & Myers. Legistorm confirms this history.
During her second stint at O’Melveny, Goldstein wrote a Washington Post op-ed with Walter Dellinger, a partner at O’Melveny who had worked in the Clinton administration. (Trump fired Dellinger’s son Hampton, who had served as the special counsel in the Office of Special Counsel, earlier this year, sparking a legal battle.) In that op-ed, Goldstein and Dellinger insisted that Trump is “unfit to hold office.”
“In the face of an unprecedented attack on American democracy by a hostile foreign power, Donald Trump and those who worked for him both as a candidate and a president failed to defend the United States,” they wrote regarding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report into accusations of collusion between Trump and Russia. “For this alone, he is unfit to hold office.”
Golstein and Dellinger wrote that the Mueller report “demonstrates that the president and his closest aides violated … fundamental duties imposed by their oaths of office,” namely the duty to protect and defend the Constitution “against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
Deep State Opposition
A recent poll found that a whopping 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 Donald Trump.
Furthermore, a recent 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.
Goldstein did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal by publication time. The Daily Signal also reached out to O’Melveny & Myers, the offices of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Defense Department, and the White House for comment.
