'Deep sense of irony': Fired Jan. 6 prosecutors were fulfilling Trump’s vow to fight DC crime

After President Donald Trump pardoned participants of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Washington's new acting U.S. attorney Ed Martin fired prosecutors who were working on criminal cases connected to the riots. This means the group prosecuting crime in Washington is becoming threadbare, even as Trump vowed to make the city safer, NOTUS reported Monday.

“When D.C.’s new acting U.S. attorney moved to fire Jan. 6 prosecutors last Friday, those who were cut sensed a deep sense of irony,” writes NOTUS’ Jose Pagliery.

Trump has repeatedly used the slogan “Make America Safe Again,” and called Washington a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.” Violent crime is the lowest it’s been in three decades, but that has not stopped Trump from fearmongering about the historically Black city.

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“He’s in the process of gutting the institution charged with prosecuting crime in the nation’s capital,” Pagliery writes. Many of the fired prosecutors, he reports, were reassigned to misdemeanor cases in D.C. Superior Court.

“It basically breaks the whole system they have,” Sara Levine, who was fired from her job as assistant U.S. attorney on the Capitol prosecution team, told NOTUS. “One of the things Ed Martin said on his first day meet-and-greet was that one of the focuses was on local crime and making sure things were cleaned up for the 250th anniversary of the country. Having a group of local prosecutors not be there is definitely going to hinder that goal he has."

“Someone like me who’s been prosecuting crime for as long as I have, if they were taking résumés off the street, I’m the person you absolutely want to get to do this kind of work,” she added.

“It was incredibly painful and tense,” A fired prosecutor who spoke to NOTUS anonymously out of safety concerns said. “We all took an oath to the Constitution. We were prepared to continue to defend that Constitution and serve the community in D.C. They fired 17 prosecutors. They can’t fill those spots. That just means there are fewer people to take on violent crime. It means the city’s less safe.”

READ MORE: 'Stomach turning': Trump defends his J6 pardons as 'great for humanity'

Sean Brennan, a prosecutor on the Jan. 6 cases, had begun working with a domestic violence victim in an ongoing case. Getting fired was like “a knife in the gut,” he told NOTUS.

Brennan described the experience as “alarming."

“Having personally worked on these cases for 17 months, it’s really alarming to see just how maximalist the effort is to rewrite the history of Jan. 6," he said. "I know in the immediate aftermath of the election, we told ourselves the record we created in court was going to stand the test of time: the motions, the exhibits, the transcripts. I still do believe that. But until Inauguration Day, I did not allow myself to believe it was going to be such a large priority of this administration to seek retribution. I don’t think we’re going to be the last ones.”