The Department of Justice stands in the early morning hours in 2019 in Washington, D.C.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
In his inauguration address, President Trump vowed to rebalance the scales of justice.
That’s happening more swiftly than anyone predicted: a fast and furious purge underway even before Trump’s nominees to serve as attorney general and FBI director have been confirmed.
The president famously faced off against the Justice Department in a pair of criminal cases over the past couple of years — until those prosecutions were dropped after he won the election. Now Trump appears to be trying to remake the institution.
“This is dreadful mistreatment by the Trump administration of career public servants,” said David Uhlmann, a former agency veteran.
More than a dozen agency veterans and outside observers spoke to NPR about the changes at the DOJ over the last 10 days, including reassignments of senior staff and moves to fire officials who investigated Trump. Largely, they said such steps go far beyond the regular moves by a president to reshape an agency to his priorities.
Instead, they say, such actions hit at the Justice Department’s impartiality and independence in enforcing the law.
Uhlmann worked at the Justice Department for more than 17 years, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. (He later took on a senior enforcement role in former President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency.) He’s watching, with dismay, as acting officials in charge at the DOJ have reassigned veteran supervisors who worked on environmental protection and put a freeze on new cases and settlements.
“President Trump is making clear that he does not intend to hold polluters accountable for exposing communities across America to harmful pollution,” Uhlmann said.
The changes don’t end there.
New Justice Department leaders transferred lawyers with decades of experience handling civil rights, extraditions, counterterrorism and cybercrime into a new office that covers immigration enforcement. That’s a key priority of the new president.
Many prosecutors think that’s designed to get them to quit.
One of them already has. Corey Amundson ran the public integrity unit at the Justice Department. He got that nonpartisan job during the first Trump administration, after years prosecuting corrupt public officials.
But his government service ended after he refused to be moved to that immigration enforcement office this week.
Then came word that more than a dozen DOJ lawyers who worked on the criminal prosecutions of Trump had been fired. The acting attorney general, James McHenry III, cited their work on the Jan. 6 and classified documents cases against Trump and said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s “agenda.”
McHenry did not provide any cause for their firing and added they could appeal their dismissals to a federal board, which would take time and money.
These changes don’t come as a surprise after the frequent criticism Trump levied at the DOJ after leaving office in 2020. On the campaign trail, he called it “the Department of Injustice” and promised to go after his political enemies inside the agency and beyond.
Since returning to the White House, Trump also signed an executive order that criticizes federal law enforcement for a “systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents” and urges departments to take corrective actions.
Politicized firing, hiring?
Sally Yates spent a quarter-century at the Justice Department, ending with a stint as acting attorney general at the end of the Obama years. Trump fired her in early 2017 after she refused to carry out his first travel ban for people from majority Muslim countries.
Yates, now in private practice, said she’s even more concerned about the institution now.
“Firing civil servants who sought to hold him accountable is really a twofer for President Trump,” Yates said. “He gets to retaliate and exact vengeance against prosecutors for just doing their jobs while also intimidating everyone across government and beyond.”
Yates said that’s no way to run a department entrusted with the impartial administration of justice. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment about changes at the agency for this story.
Politicized hiring scandals have hit the Justice Department before. Congress and an inspector general investigated the firings of U.S. Attorneys — political appointees — for potentially improper reasons in the George W. Bush administration.
Back then, watchdogs ultimately found a young political aide installed inside the DOJ sought to cultivate a “farm system” for Republicans, by hiring scores of prosecutors and immigration judges who espoused conservative priorities and practiced Christian lifestyle choices.
But this moment feels different and more serious to many Justice Department veterans. None could remember a time when a team of prosecutors had been fired for their work on a particular case: essentially, fired for doing their job.
FBI agents ordered to resign
Separately, at least five senior FBI officials were notified on Thursday that they should retire or resign by Monday or be fired, according to two FBI sources familiar with the situation. The notifications did not provide a reason for the move. The FBI declined to comment.
FBI employees have been notified that officials are creating a list of Bureau personnel who worked on Jan. 6 Capitol riot cases, to include their job title, role in the investigation, and their supervisor. The results are due next week, after which DOJ “will conduct a review to determine if additional personnel actions are necessary.”
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, said “Trump’s outrageous attack on the DOJ and FBI is a clear and present danger to public safety, and a wrecking ball swinging at the rule of law.”
And the FBI Agents Association warned of dire consequences.
“Dismissing potentially hundreds of Agents would severely weaken the Bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the Bureau and its new leadership for failure,” the association said in a statement.
Meantime, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, launched an internal review over that office’s handling of hundreds of cases against Jan. 6 rioters. He also announced the dismissal of more than two dozen prosecutors who worked on those cases but who are in their probationary period, giving them fewer job protections.
Martin previously played a role in the stop the steal election fraud movement and sat on the board of a group that supported Jan. 6 defendants.
Mary McCord worked at the Justice Department nearly 25 years. She worries this is the start of something bigger.
“What does that start, are we now going to be in a cycle of every change in administration, there’s retribution against those who took positions, whether it’s prosecutorial positions or policy positions that you disagreed with?” asked McCord, who is now at Georgetown Law Center.
Alberto Gonzales led the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.
Every president is elected on a set of law enforcement priorities, Gonzales said. And those deserve a lot of discretion and support.
“The difference here may be in the speed and the language of the changes that may be a bit jarring,” said Gonzales, who’s now the dean of the Belmont University College of Law.
Some of that rhetoric “will likely be toned down or disappear” in the event of a national security or high-profile criminal incident, he said.
But Gonzales said it may be hard for new political appointees to get the very large DOJ moving in the direction they want.
