WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Friday fired a group of prosecutors involved in the Jan. 6 criminal cases and demanded the names of FBI agents involved in those same probes so they can possibly be ousted, moves that reflect a White House determination to exert control over federal law enforcement and purge agencies of career employees seen as insufficiently loyal.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the firings of the Jan. 6 prosecutors days after President Donald Trump's sweeping clemency action benefiting the more than 1,500 people charged in the U.S. Capitol attack, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press. About two dozen employees at the U.S. attorney's office in Washington were terminated, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters.
A separate memo by Bove identified more than a half-dozen FBI senior executives who were ordered to resign or be fired by Monday, and also asked for the names and records related to all agents who worked on investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot — a list the bureau’s acting director said could number in the thousands. Bove, who was defended Trump in his criminal cases before joining the administration, said Justice Department officials would then carry out a “review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
“As we've said since the moment we agreed to take on these roles, we are going to follow the law, follow FBI policy, and do what's in the best interest of the workforce and the American people — always,” Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll wrote in a letter to the workforce.
The prosecutors who were fired in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office had been hired for temporary assignments to support the Jan. 6 cases, but were moved into permanent roles after Trump's presidential win in November, according to the memo obtained by the AP. Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, said he would not “tolerate subversive personnel actions by the previous administration."
Any mass firings at the FBI would be a major blow to the historic independence from the White House of the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency and would reflect Trump’s persistent resolve to bend the law enforcement and intelligence community to his will. It would be part of a startling pattern of retribution waged on federal government employees, following the forced ousters of a group of senior FBI executives earlier this week as well as a mass firing by the Justice Department of prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team who investigated Trump.
The FBI Agents Association said any mass firings would be “outrageous actions by acting officials are fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI Agents.”
“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.
It was not immediately clear what recourse any fired agent might take, but the bureau has a well-defined process for terminations and any abrupt action that bypasses the protocol could presumably open the door to a legal challenge.
When pressed during his confirmation hearing Thursday, Trump’s pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, said he was not aware of any plans to terminate or otherwise punish FBI employees who were involved in the Trump investigations. Patel said if he was confirmed he would follow the FBI’s internal review processes for taking action against employees.
Asked by Democratic Sen. Cory Booker whether he would reverse any decisions before his confirmation that don’t follow that standard process, Patel said, “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there, but I’m committed to you, senator, and your colleagues, that I will honor the due process of the FBI.”
Before he was nominated for the director’s position, Patel had remarked on at least one podcast appearance about the existence of what he called anti-Trump “conspirators” in the government and news media.
Trump has for years expressed fury at the FBI and Justice Department over investigations that shadowed his presidency, including an inquiry into ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign, and continued over the last four years. He fired one FBI director, James Comey, amid the Russia investigation and then replaced his second, Christopher Wray, just weeks after winning the election this past November.
Asked at the White House on Friday if he had anything to do with the scrutiny of the agents, he said: “No, but we have some very bad people over there. It was weaponized at a level that nobody’s never seen before. They came after a lot of people — like me – but they came after a lot of people.”
He added, “If they fired some people over there, that’s a good thing, because they were very bad.”
The FBI and Smith’s team investigated Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Both of those cases resulted in indictments that were withdrawn after Trump’s November presidential win because of longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the federal prosecution of a sitting president.
The Justice Department also charged more than 1,500 Trump supporters in connection with the Capitol riot, though Trump on his first day in office granted clemency to all of them — including the ones convicted of violent crimes — through pardons, sentence commutations and dismissals of indictments.
This week, the Justice Department fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on Smith investigations, and a group of senior FBI executives — including several executive assistant directors and leaders of big-city field offices — were told to either resign or retire or be fired Monday.
Spokespeople for the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.
_____
Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Michael Kunzelman, Byron Tau and Jim Mustian contributed to this report.
Eric Tucker And Alanna Durkin Richer, The Associated Press