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 ongoing — and likely to get worse. Evidently, the increasingly hyperpartisan Republican meant it. NBC News reported late last week:
At least two federal prosecutors and support staffers who worked with former special counsel Jack Smith’s team were fired [on Friday], three of their former colleagues told NBC News. The total number of firings was not immediately clear. The dismissals come after at least three federal prosecutors who worked on cases against Jan. 6 rioters were fired last month by Attorney General Pam Bondi, NBC News previously reported.
By some accounts, they had quite a bit of company. The New York Times reported that the Trump administration fired “another batch of nearly 10 Justice Department employees” who worked, in one capacity or another, for the former special counsel’s office. Among those ousted, the article added, were personnel who worked as “support staff” for Smith and his team.
The Washington Post’s tally was even larger: “In total, 20 people were fired from the department, including two prosecutors who worked under former special counsel Jack Smith … and U.S. marshals who assisted those prosecutors.”
Soon after, Bloomberg Law reported that Bondi also fired her personal ethics adviser — Joseph Tirrell, a career attorney who’d spent nearly 20 years at the department — “removing the Justice Department’s top official responsible for counseling the most senior political appointees.” (Tirrell soon after published a copy of his termination letter to his LinkedIn page.)
A day later, Reuters reported that the Federal Programs Branch, the Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies, “has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff.
Related efforts have been unfolding episodically for months, with a special emphasis on punishing law enforcement personnel who worked on Jan. 6 cases and criminal investigations into the president. As NBC News reported two weeks ago, “The Trump administration in late January fired probationary federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and prosecutors who worked on former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump. The administration also demoted some career prosecutors who worked on the Capitol siege investigation.”
It was against this backdrop that 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.” (The DOJ did not immediately respond to CBS News’ requests for comment.)
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, all of these developments have had a destabilizing effect. A separate Washington Post report, published last week, noted 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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