The pardon attorney of the US justice department was recently fired after refusing to recommend that Mel Gibson be allowed to own guns again, a right denied since the actor, director and prominent ally of Donald Trump was sentenced to probation for domestic violence in 2011, the New York Times reported.

The pardon attorney is a non-political role, supervising matters of clemency and recommendations for presidential pardons. Elizabeth Oyer was appointed under Joe Biden’s presidency in 2022. She told the Times she had been working on a project to restore gun ownership rights to some people convicted of crimes and misdemeanors, a power held by the justice department but not often used.

A list of 95 candidates was whittled down to nine by senior figures, Oler said, then “sent … back to me saying: ‘We would like you to add Mel Gibson to this memo.’”

According to the Times, Oyer was also sent a January letter from Gibson’s lawyer addressed to two senior justice department officials, James McHenry and Emil Bove, “arguing for [Gibson’s] gun rights to be restored, saying that he had been tapped for a special appointment by the president and that he had made a number of big, successful movies”.

On 16 January, four days before starting his second presidency, Trump said the 69-year-old star of Mad Max, Braveheart and other blockbusters had been named, alongside two other veteran actors, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, “special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California”.

Oyer told the Times: “Giving guns back to domestic abusers is a serious matter that, in my view, is not something that I could recommend lightly, because there are real consequences that flow from people who have a history of domestic violence being in possession of firearms.”

She said she was “vaguely aware” of a 2006 episode in which Gibson was stopped by a police officer on suspicion of drunk driving and responded with antisemitic abuse.

As described by Oyer, after she made clear her opposition to restoring Gibson’s gun rights, a senior official under the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, asked if she was “flexible”. Told she was not, the official “shifted from friendly to condescending to bullying”, and “essentially explained to me that Mel Gibson has a personal relationship with President Trump and that should be sufficient basis for me to make a recommendation and that I would be wise to make the recommendation”, Oyer said.

Like Bove, Blanche was an attorney for Trump in criminal cases, including one in New York which resulted in 34 felony convictions arising from hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star who claimed an affair.

After the conversation, Oyer said, she “literally did not sleep a wink, because I understood that the position I was in was one that was going to either require me to compromise my strongly held views and ethics or would likely result in me losing my ability to participate in these conversations going forward”.

According to the Times, Oyer told a colleague: “I can’t believe this, but I really think Mel Gibson is going to be my downfall.”

On Friday, Oyer was among high-profile figures fired from the justice department. She told the Times the termination happened suddenly.

The Times said two anonymous sources confirmed Oyer’s version of events. Speaking to NBC News, an unnamed senior justice department official said: “The fact that this was the No 1 thing they wanted to address was bizarre.”

Unnamed justice department officials told the Times and NBC Oyer’s account was not accurate. A representative for Gibson did not respond to a Times comment request.

On Saturday, Gibson was seen at a Las Vegas Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event in the company of Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, an agency of the justice department.

At that event, the UFC president, Dana White, made headlines by saying Patel was “dead serious” about partnering with the promotion company to train FBI agents.

Oyer told the Times that senior officials wanted to make a quick announcement about people having gun rights restored, a group that would presumably include Gibson – though by Tuesday no such announcement had been made.