Among the many problems that have emerged in federal law enforcement during Donald Trump’s second term is the campaign against key personnel. Indeed, there’s been an unsubtle campaign to purge federal law enforcement of prosecutors and FBI officials who worked on cases that the president didn’t like.
Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested in March that these efforts were likely to get worse. Evidently, she meant it. The Miami Herald reported last week:
Federal prosecutor Will Rosenzweig took a short break from his healthcare fraud and money-laundering cases at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami this week to observe the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, with his family. But he noticed something was amiss when his office-issued mobile phone wasn’t working on Tuesday. He called the office to find out what was wrong. Rosenzweig soon learned his phone was shut off because he had been fired by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The attorney general reportedly ousted Rosenzweig because, eight years ago, while working for a private law firm, he said negative things about Trump via social media. This was long before he became a successful federal prosecutor. Bondi, evidently, didn’t care.
The Herald’s report noted that Rosenzweig’s Trump criticisms were identified by right-wing influencers who were hunting for federal officials who’d failed to show sufficient loyalty to Trump. And since far-right influencers are steering the White House, as opposed to the other way around, the attorney general apparently felt compelled to show Rosenzweig the door.
This roughly coincided with Trump firing Erik Siebert, the Trump-nominated U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, for failing to bring weak cases against the president’s political enemies.
What’s more, the day after the Miami Herald report was published, The New York Times reported:
For 15 years, Michele Beckwith oversaw some of the toughest federal prosecutions in California. She went after transnational terrorists, sex traffickers and the Aryan brotherhood. She became the acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento this year when her boss, a Biden appointee, stepped down in January. But her career crumbled in July, she said, after she issued a warning to Gregory Bovino, the California face of President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
According to the Times’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC, the trouble began in earnest in July, when Beckwith reminded Bovino that the Border Patrol was under a federal court order prohibiting it from stopping people indiscriminately in her district. When she came to believe that Bovino was moving forward with plans for a raid, she emailed him to reiterate she expected “compliance with court orders and the Constitution.”
Hours later, the Times noted, she received a call from the White House, letting her know she’d been fired. Beckwith, after insisting on following a court order, “was promptly marched out of the office.”
It was the same week in which Justice Department fired 20 other people, including two prosecutors who worked under former special counsel Jack Smith and U.S. marshals who assisted those prosecutors.
In July, Patty Hartman, a 17-year former Justice Department official who worked on Jan. 6 cases, told CBS News after her firing, “The rules don’t exist anymore.” She added, “There used to be a line, used to be a very distinct separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, because one should not interfere with the work of the other. That line is very definitely gone.”
In a social media post, Hartman went on to write, “We appear to be driving straight into an abyss that holds no memory of what democracy is, was, or should be.” Predictably, these developments have had a destabilizing effect. The Washington Post recently reported that employees across the Justice Department and FBI have been fired without explanation or warning, “creating rampant speculation and fear within the workforce over who might be terminated next.” The article added that the removals appear “individually targeted” and are “unrelated to the mass reductions-in-force and reorganizations that Trump has launched at many other federal agencies.” In her CBS News interview, Hartman said the administration has “just thrown all of the rules out the window … and I really, truly hope that the country can pull out of it.” This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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