Michael Gates resigns from U.S. Department of Justice, returns to Huntington Beach
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Michael Gates, who served Huntington Beach as its outspoken city attorney for more than a decade, is returning to City Hall.
Gates said Monday that he has resigned from his job in the Trump Administration as the deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
He said he is returning to the Huntington Beach city attorney’s office as the chief assistant city attorney, effective Nov. 24.
Gates, a Republican, served in the federal job for about 10 months.
“I was flying back here [to Huntington Beach] once a month, and my wife would fly out there [to Washington, D.C.] once a month,” he said. “A lot of saying goodbye to the kids, saying ‘I’ll see you next month.’ I was missing a lot of surf competitions, my son’s varsity football games.”
Gates, 50, and his wife, Kelly, are the parents of five children.
He called working for the Trump Administration “once in a lifetime” and “the honor of a lifetime,” but added that it was hard to embrace two different lives on two different coasts.
“These 10 months, at times it felt like 10 years,” he said. “It was amazing, but I couldn’t wait to see the kids. My wife was getting together with my oldest son and our grandkids, and I missed all that. We were trying to do it by FaceTime, and it’s not the same. Kind of rough stuff.”
Mike Vigliotta, a longtime assistant city attorney in Huntington Beach, was appointed by the City Council to serve in the top spot after Gates resigned to take the federal job. Gates said he plans to run for city attorney again next year.
Huntington Beach is one of a few cities statewide that has an elected city attorney. Gates was first elected in 2014 and reelected in 2018 and 2022.
Gates posted his resignation letter from the federal job, dated Nov. 8, on social media.
Some critics have reacted to the news by suggesting it was a sign Gates wasn’t successful in that position, but he laughed at that assertion. Gates said he had more than 100 attorneys below him that he was leading on enforcement efforts including elections, housing, land use discrimination, religious discrimination and more.
“I lasted far longer than many,” he said. “No, I did great, and I could have kept fighting the battles that I started ... If people can’t understand the sacrifice I was making and they want to be cynical about it, that’s fine. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just noise. We kicked so much [behind].”
He had been working from home in Huntington Beach during the government shutdown, he said, and was deployed to the Riverside area to do election monitoring earlier this month when voters were asked to weigh in on Proposition 50.
Gates returns to a Huntington Beach that has an all-MAGA city council that remains embroiled in fights with state leadership on various issues.
Voter identification in Huntington Beach was recently struck down by an appellate court, but Gates said he thinks there’s a good chance that the state Supreme Court will review the case.
He added that a case where an attorney is trying to change Huntington Beach’s at-large elections to district-based elections, claiming minority residents are being disenfranchised, is now going to trial. Gates said he’ll be available to try the case.
“There’s a lot of great — and I think critical — legal battles [for Huntington Beach],” Gates said.
