A few weeks ago, Donald Trump’s Justice Department gutted the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, shrinking the unit that oversees prosecutions of public officials accused of corruption from dozens of employees to roughly six. A week earlier, the president’s DOJ also removed at least three top national security officials, gutting the National Security Division.
One day earlier, the president’s Justice Department also ousted lawyers managing its pardon work and bankruptcy litigation, as well as the official overseeing the Office of Professional Responsibility, which handles internal ethics investigations.
Despite these steps, which helped destabilize federal law enforcement, Team Trump had not targeted career line prosecutors who oversee individual criminal cases — that is, until a few days ago. The New York Times reported:
Two longtime career prosecutors have been suddenly fired by the White House, in what current and former Justice Department officials called an unusual and alarming exercise of presidential power. In recent days, the prosecutors, in Los Angeles and Memphis, were dismissed abruptly, notified by a terse one-sentence email stating no reason for the move other than that it was on behalf of the president himself.
Asked about the firings, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Times, “The White House, in coordination with the Department of Justice, has dismissed more than 50 U.S. attorneys and deputies in the past few weeks.”
That’s true, but it’s not something to brag about.
Just so we’re all clear, when one presidential administration replaces another, it’s routine for a White House to replace U.S. attorneys with a new batch of prosecutors who oversee federal law enforcement offices. Barack Obama chose a slate of U.S. attorneys to replace George W. Bush’s prosecutors; Trump replaced Obama’s; Joe Biden replaced Trump’s; and so on.
But these new developments are qualitatively different. From the Times’ report:
The ousters reflected a more aggressive effort by the White House to reach deep inside U.S. attorney offices across the country in a stark departure from decades of practice. While it is commonplace and accepted for senior political appointees at the Justice Department to change from administration to administration, no department veteran could recall any similar removal of assistant U.S. attorneys.
The fired prosecutors, who were ousted without warning, were career officials with extensive experience. If there’s any evidence that the two lawyers, Adam Schleifer and Reagan Fondren, deserved to be ousted for cause, the White House and the Justice Department have kept that information to themselves. That said, Schleifer was working on a case involving a Trump donor. Leavitt added, in response to questions about the firings, “The American people deserve a judicial branch full of honest arbiters of the law who want to protect democracy, not subvert it,” which might’ve made slightly more sense if federal prosecutors were part of the judicial branch, but they’re not. (Prosecutors are part of the executive branch.) If you’re thinking that developments like these are likely to have a chilling effect, signaling to other career line prosecutors that the Republican White House is both watching and willing to take dramatic steps to rein in those who work in a U.S. attorney’s office, you’re not alone.
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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