Story highlights Hui Chen served as compliance counsel at DOJ since 2015

Chen tweeted a picture of herself protesting outside the White House in May

(CNN) Lawyers at the Justice Department are typically mum on frank details surrounding an early resignation, so it's especially unusual when one directly points to the conduct of the President of the United States as the reason for quitting.

But Hui Chen, an anti-corruption expert who formerly served in the department's fraud section of the criminal division, is publicly speaking out on the struggle of working for the top law enforcement arm of the federal government when the President dominates the headlines with what she describes as potential conflicts of interest and abuses of power she would have found unacceptable from a CEO under federal investigation.

"I could have left on November 9 or January 21, but I didn't," Chen explained in an interview with CNN. "I liked the importance of the work and loved the people I worked with (at the Justice Department). The decision wasn't easy."

In May, Chen told the department she planned to resign, but made waves when she described the circumstances of her recent departure -- including the "cognitive dissonance" of "trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to" -- in a particularly candid post on LinkedIn last week.

"To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair(s) on the Titanic," Chen wrote. "Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest ... and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts."

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