The firing of multiple career Justice Department lawyers involved in prosecuting Donald Trump on Monday was designed to intimidate the Justice Department and FBI workforce and deter investigations of Trump’s second administration, five former Justice Department and FBI officials told NBC News.
“They are scaring people into behaving a certain way,” said a former senior FBI official, who asked not to be named, citing fears of retaliation.
“Imagine if anyone in the new administration legitimately abuses their position," he added. "Is anyone in DOJ or FBI really going to investigate that now?”
Stephen Gillers, a New York University professor of law emeritus and legal ethics expert, said Trump appears to be trying to achieve two goals: punishing his perceived enemies and deterring future criminal probes.
“The motive is retribution,” Gillers said. “At the same time, he also warns others that they will suffer the same fate if they cross him. So a second motive is deterrence. What we have then is both revenge and behavior modification.”
A spokesperson for the Justice Department, now run by an acting deputy attorney general appointed by Trump, declined to comment.
Among those fired Monday were multiple career prosecutors who worked on the team of special counsel Jack Smith, who charged Trump with mishandling classified documents and interfering in the 2020 election. They include Molly Gaston, J.P. Cooney, Anne McNamara and Mary Dohrmann, an official familiar with the matter said.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to revamp the Justice Department and the FBI, accusing both of pursuing politically motivated “witch hunts” against him. Smith and former Attorney General Merrick Garland repeatedly said Trump’s own actions, not political bias, resulted in the criminal prosecutions.
Trump’s election victory suggested that voters still support him and his vows to shake up Washington. “The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” Trump said in his inaugural address last week. “The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.”
A former career Justice Department official who worked during Trump’s first term and asked not to be named, citing fears of retribution, said the firings were driven by revenge but were also strategic.
“He fired them out of anger and spite,” the former Justice Department official said. “He is trying to intimidate other officials in an effort to get them to submit to him personally rather than to their jobs and the Constitution.”
A second former Justice Department official predicted that acts of retribution would continue if Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee, is confirmed as FBI director.
Patel, whose confirmation hearing is Thursday, has blamed career civil servants for being part of a “deep state” plot to undermine Trump’s presidency. Patel published a list of 50 people in a 2023 memoir who he said were members of the “executive branch deep state.”
The second former Justice Department official said: “The firings are designed not just to punish these career officials who were simply doing their jobs, but to send a chilling and sinister message to other career employees that they better not stand in the way of people like Kash Patel who have vowed to target Trump’s political opponents.”
Multiple reassigments
Last week, Justice Department officials reassigned four senior career prosecutors also involved in Trump investigations to a crackdown on sanctuary cities. The former officials warned that the loss of prosecutors with decades of experience will slow federal counterterrorism, criminal and cyber investigations and potentially put the public at risk.
The reassigned prosecutors were moved to a new Justice Department task force created last week that will investigate state or local officials who resist or fail to comply with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
A third former Justice Department official said the demotions of the senior career prosecutors would weaken the department and the FBI.
“Only a fool could think that introducing turmoil into — and removing expertise from — our national security mission is a good idea,” said the third former official, who also requested anonymity because of concerns about retribution.
George Toscas, a senior civil servant in the Justice Department’s National Security Division who was involved in the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida, in 2022, was reassigned to the sanctuary city task force last week, NBC News reported last week.
So was Eun Young Choi, a career prosecutor in the National Security Division, who helped convict Ross Ulbricht, a cryptocurrency backer who helped found Silk Road, a black market on the dark web that sold illegal drugs, The Washington Post reported.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht, a folk hero in the libertarian and crypto communities, if they supported him. On his first full day in office, Trump pardoned Ulbricht and denounced the federal prosecutors who convicted him.
“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me,” Trump wrote.
The second former Justice Department official said reassigning career prosecutors put the public at risk.
“The senior career DOJ officials who have been targeted are in charge of investigating the most sensitive and complex national security threats facing the country — from active terrorist plots to Chinese cyberattacks,” the former official said. “They are extraordinary public servants who have devoted their professional lives to national security. There’s just no way to replace their decades of experience and leadership.”
Multiple Republicans in Congress, though, have said the Justice Department and the FBI need sweeping reform. Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” last month that Patel “represents the type of change that we need to see in the FBI. ... The entire agency needs to be cleaned out.”
“There are serious problems at the FBI,” Hagerty added. “The American public knows it.”
Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, said Trump’s victory in November is a sign of the support he still enjoys from voters.
Naftali said Trump and President Richard Nixon are similar in that they both tend to view the world in terms of allies or enemies. He said Trump, though, has been far more successful than Nixon at convincing Americans that all of the investigations of his conduct have been improper.
Until that public perception fades, Naftali said, Trump is likely to continue to openly retaliate.
“He’s managed to convince people that the exercise of investigative powers against Donald J. Trump is always illegitimate,” Naftali said. “That’s amazing. That gives him latitude. That’s the era we are living in.”
