Trump DOJ Fires More Than A Dozen Career Prosecutors Who Worked On January 6 Cases, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Justice Department Was Employing The Same People Who Had Just Done Its Job

WASHINGTON. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove on Friday evening ordered the dismissal of more than a dozen career federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia who had spent the preceding four years prosecuting cases arising from the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, resolving a long-standing concern within the new administration that the Department of Justice was continuing to employ the same lawyers who had just done its job.

The firings, transmitted by Friday-evening email, targeted assistant U.S. attorneys whose work had produced convictions for assaulting police officers, obstruction of an official proceeding, and seditious conspiracy. They followed by ten days the executive order in which the President pardoned, commuted, or dismissed cases against approximately 1,500 of the defendants those same prosecutors had convicted, an action that converted the prosecutors' completed work into a category of professional history the administration described as no longer compatible with continued federal employment.

Bove, formerly Mr. Trump's personal defense attorney in two federal criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, wrote in an internal memorandum that the Department "cannot trust" the prosecutors to faithfully execute the policies of the new administration, by which Bove meant the policy of regarding the people the prosecutors had convicted as patriots. The memorandum further directed the FBI to compile a list of every special agent who had worked on January 6 investigations, a request the bureau's acting director was instructed to fulfill within a week.

"It is the position of this Department that prosecutors who participated in the largest investigation in the history of the Department of Justice may no longer participate in the Department of Justice," a senior administration official explained, declining to address how this position would be reconciled with the federal hiring statutes the official appeared to be describing as no longer binding.

Several of the dismissed prosecutors held positions protected by federal civil service law and had received recent performance evaluations rating their work exemplary, a circumstance that DOJ officials characterized as legally inconvenient but operationally surmountable. Six additional senior career attorneys resigned across the following week, including supervisors in the Public Integrity Section who had refused to sign onto subsequent administration directives, including the order to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

At press time, the President was preparing to nominate his personal attorney's personal attorney to fill a vacancy at the office that had until recently been responsible for ensuring his personal attorneys faced no consequences.