While every federal prosecutor’s office is important, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia stands out for a reason: This is the office that handles many of the country’s most sensitive national security cases.
It’s also an office that Donald Trump’s operation continues to destabilize. The New York Times reported:
A federal prosecutor who resisted President Trump’s demands to bring charges against Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, was fired along with her deputy on Friday evening, according to three people familiar with the matter. The dismissal of the prosecutor, Elizabeth Yusi, was the latest fallout from attempts by career Justice Department officials to pump the brakes on Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging efforts to seek retribution against his perceived political opponents.
The Times’ report noted that Yusi, who oversaw major criminal cases in the Norfolk office, told colleagues that there was insufficient evidence to bring a case against the New York attorney general. Trump, however, wanted his perceived political enemy to be indicted, and so his team made it happen, ignoring Yusi and her concerns about propriety and merit.
What’s more, MSNBC reported that Yusi was one of two criminal prosecutors in the Norfolk office who were ousted, not because of wrongdoing but because they expressed skepticism about filing a weak case against a presidential opponent.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. Erik Siebert was also ousted as the U.S. attorney in Virginia’s eastern district because he wouldn’t bring baseless criminal charges against Trump’s political enemies, and soon after Michael Ben’Ary, the top national security prosecutor in Virginia, was fired after a pro-Trump activist peddled a baseless accusation against him related to another case against one of Trump’s political enemies.
In other words, in this one office — the one that handles many of the country’s most sensitive national security cases — the president’s team has ousted at least four prosecutors, including a Trump-nominated U.S. attorney.
This is not to be confused with the ouster of the Trump-nominated U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, also for political reasons, which roughly coincided with the firing of a federal prosecutor in Miami because far-right activists discovered that he criticized Trump eight years ago while in private practice, or with the dismissal of a federal prosecutor in California because she urged immigration officials to comply with a court order. For that matter, the full list of prosecutors caught up in the purge of federal law enforcement because they worked on cases the president didn’t like has been difficult to keep up with. The corrupt motivations behind this political campaign against prosecutors is many things, but subtle is not one of them. 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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