Trump DOJ Fires Numerous Jan. 6 Prosecutors in Washington

The Trump Justice Department’s top political appointee directed officials to fire at least a dozen prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 Capitol riot cases, a memo obtained by Bloomberg Law showed.

The memo from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, and other Justice Department officials to “take all steps necessary to effectuate the termination” of line prosecutors focused on Jan. 6 cases who’d been converted from temporary to permanent status shortly before President Donald Trump took office.

The positions were advertised as two-year appointments that could be extended for one year or made permanent at agency discretion. Yet Bove’s memo questioned the timing of redesignations in the weeks after the election.

“I will not tolerate subversive personnel actions by the previous Administration at any U.S. Attorney’s Office. Too much is at stake,” the memo said. “In light of the foregoing, the appropriate course is to terminate those employees, and to take all appropriate steps to ensure that resources allocated to their hiring and employment is available to Acting U.S. Attorney Martin for merit-based hiring.”

The number of impacted employees is believed to be in the range of 20 to 40, said people familiar with the situation.

The firings come less than two weeks after Trump issued a presidential proclamation broadly pardoning or dismissing charges against more than 1,500 people who participated in the Jan. 6 riot during the certification of the presidential election that he lost.

Trump tapped Martin, previously an advocate for Jan. 6 defendants, to lead the D.C. US Attorney’s office that handled those prosecutions.

Martin has launched an internal review into Jan. 6 prosecutions involving an obstruction statute, which was narrowed last year by the Supreme Court.

Martin has asked employees to retain records related to those prosecutions and said employees who don’t cooperate will be seen as “insubordinate,” in a Jan. 28 office-wide email.

In addition to calling for the employee terminations, Bove detailed an ongoing inquiry into their conversions, which took place when Biden-appointee Matthew Graves was US attorney. He cited Trump’s executive order on ending government weaponization to justify the probe.

Due to budgetary limits, it’s common for DOJ offices to hire prosecutors for two-year terms, before extending or converting them to permanent.