Abhishek Kambli, a little more than two weeks from defending President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms in court, is joining GOP-aligned boutique Holtzman Vogel.
The former deputy associate attorney general announced May 7 he would be leaving the Justice Department after slightly more than a year there, though he didn’t disclose until Monday—his first day at his new job—where he was headed.
“By the one-year mark there, basically everything that I really wanted to accomplish was accomplished,” Kambli said in an interview of his time at DOJ. “It was time to take on some new challenges.”
Among his high-profile roles at DOJ, he was part of a legal team in 2025 that defended Trump’s deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members before US District Judge James Boasberg, who said the DOJ team ignored his verbal order to stop the flights.
On May 14, he argued before a US appeals court panel in a bid to broadly revive Trump’s orders against law firms that threatened to revoke some lawyers’ access to security clearances and cancel their clients’ government contracts.
The panel hasn’t yet ruled on the appeal after district courts struck down as unconstitutional the orders that Trump said were justified by the firms’ “weaponization” of the legal system.
“Doing over 20 arguments in a 15-month period is something that I’m proud of, especially given that every one of them was high stakes with a lot on the line,” Kambli said.
His new firm has ties to the Trump administration and the Republican Party. Its founder, Jill Holtzman Vogel, led the national GOP’s legal efforts during the 2004 presidential election as chief counsel of the Republican National Committee and served 16 years in the Virginia state Senate.
Then President-elect Trump named a lawyer at the firm in 2024, William McGinley, as White House counsel before swapping his role to DOGE, the quasi-public body led by billionaire Elon Musk.
The firm has more than 65 attorneys in eight offices, according to its website, and specializes in political, regulatory and litigation matters.
Kambli will join the boutique’s state attorneys general practice and the government and congressional investigations group in the firm’s Washington DC and New York offices. He also plans to work within the firm’s election law practice and civil rights practice, he said.
“Having the benefit of litigating in the high stakes cases—that’s something that most Big Law litigators are not going to have,” he said.
Before joining DOJ, Kambli spent most of the Biden administration as a prosecutor for the Southern District of Indiana in Indianapolis.
He also spent seven years as a lawyer for the US Air Force, where his work included representing an accused 9/11 conspirator before the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Kambli, who was born in India and raised in Connecticut, said he will continue to serve as appellate counsel in the Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel.
Jill Holtzman Vogel said in a statement that Kambli’s “experience working inside the Department of Justice, defending the White House and coordinating constitutional litigation across states, reflects his extraordinary skill and accomplishment.”