Trump DOJ fires 'more than a dozen' prosecutors from Jack Smith’s team

27 January

The U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald Trump’s Acting Attorney General, James McHenry, on Monday reportedly fired career prosecutors who worked for Special Counsel Jack Smith and were involved in the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump. The number of attorneys fired was “more than a dozen,” according to The Washington Examiner.

“Given your significant role in prosecuting the President, I do not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” McHenry wrote to the lawyers, the Examiner also reported.

Special Counsel Jack Smith prosecuted Donald Trump for allegedly unlawfully removing, retaining, and refusing to return classified documents including the nation’s nuclear secrets, largely under the Espionage Act. He also prosecuted Trump for his actions to subvert the 2020 election, including those surrounding the attack on the U.S. Capitol and the insurrection.

The Trump Department of Justice “announced Monday that it had fired several career lawyers involved in prosecuting Donald Trump,” who “had been involved in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that led to now-dismissed indictments against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol,” NBC News reported.

President Donald Trump’s newly-appointed interim U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, is an attorney who reportedly “led the ‘Stop the Steal’ effort” to overturn the U.S. election and “represented Jan. 6 defendants.” The Washington Post reported Monday that Martin has launched a “special project” to investigate “the office’s charging of more than 250 Capitol riot defendants with obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, a statute the Supreme Court ruled last June was too broadly applied.”

Martin, who helped craft the Republican Party’s 2024 platform, reportedly “has raised jailing women who get abortions and advocated for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest,” according to a CNN report last summer. Martin has served as president of far-right groups aligned with the late anti-feminism and anti-LGBTQ activist Phyllis Schlafly.

“Obviously, the use was a great failure of our office … and we need to get to the bottom of it,” Martin wrote in the email announcing the new investigations, according to The Washington Post, “saying he expected a preliminary report by Friday.”

Martin’s “focus on prosecutors’ charging decisions is likely to cheer President Donald Trump and other right-wing supporters who have called for prosecutors to be prosecuted,” the Post also reported.

Opening investigations into the prosecutions is a move similar to the investigations and reviews under the first Trump administration, of why Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed and why the DOJ and FBI investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

National security attorney Mark Zaid remarked on the firings of Smith’s prosecutors, “This is not how the system is supposed to work, and will be challenged.”

Monday’s moves also follow Trump’s highly-controversial and some suggest unlawful firings of approximately 17 Inspectors General last week in what Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer labeled a “chilling purge.”

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