Trump administration fires prosecutors involved in January 6 cases

The Trump administration has fired a group of prosecutors involved in criminal cases relating to the January 6 2021 storming of the US Capitol building in Washington.

They have also demanded the names of FBI agents involved in those same probes so they can possibly be ousted.

Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove ordered the firings of the January 6 prosecutors, days after President Donald Trump’s sweeping clemency action benefiting the more than 1,500 people charged in the US Capitol attack, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

According to a person familiar with the matter, about two dozen employees at the US attorney’s office in Washington were fired. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters.

Mr Bove, who defended Mr 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 Washington DC US attorney’s office had been hired for temporary assignments to support the January 6 cases but were moved into permanent roles after Mr Trump’s presidential win in November, according to the memo obtained by the AP.

Mr 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 Mr 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 removal 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 Mr 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.

When pressed during his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Mr 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. Mr Patel said if he was confirmed he would follow the FBI’s internal review processes for taking action against employees.

Before he was nominated for the director’s position, Mr 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.

Mr 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 weaponised 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.

“If they fired some people over there, that’s a good thing, because they were very bad.”

The FBI and Mr Smith’s team investigated Mr 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 Mr Trump’s November presidential win because of long-standing 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, although on his first day in office the president granted clemency to all of them — including the ones convicted of violent crimes — through pardons, sentence commutations and dismissals of indictments.

Spokespeople for the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.