Doj Fires Dozens Of Prosecutors Who Handled Jan. 6 Cases

The Justice Department abruptly fired dozens of prosecutors who worked on criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to correspondence reviewed by POLITICO and an interview with one of the people who were terminated.

Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin emailed the employees just before 5 p.m. Friday, appending a memo from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove revealing an effort to root out employees the Trump administration considers improperly hired by the outgoing Biden administration.

It’s the latest extraordinary purge of officials Donald Trump has deemed adversarial to his interests. In recent days, the administration initiated a major reshuffling at the FBI, and last week, Trump fired numerous inspectors general across the federal government.

One of the fired prosecutors who handled some of the 1,600 criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6 riot said about 25 to 30 colleagues were fired. Some prosecutors were also moved to different offices, according to the fired individual, who is a former assistant U.S. attorney and spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity because he fears further reprisals.

During the massive four-year criminal investigation of the Jan. 6 attack, the Justice Department tapped hundreds of prosecutors from across the country to pursue cases.

Trump shut down the Capitol riot probe on his first day in office when he granted mass pardons to Jan. 6 rioters and ordered the department to drop the charges in pending Jan. 6 cases.

“Today we received direction about some folks leaving our employment,” Martin wrote in his terse email to staff at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Martin is a longtime crusader for Jan. 6 rioters; Trump tapped him to fill the role of the district’s top prosecutor on an interim basis. The full-time U.S. attorney position requires Senate confirmation.

Martin’s email attached a memo from Bove, a high-ranking official at Main Justice who formerly represented Trump in his criminal cases, including the federal case in which Trump was charged with subverting the 2020 election and stoking the Jan. 6 riot. Bove’s memo cited a department-wide effort to terminate so-called probationary employees who had been converted to “permanent” status by the Biden administration in the weeks after the 2024 election.

The targeted prosecutors had been hired by the prior U.S. attorney to help with Jan. 6 case work, Bove’s memo said. Bove intimated that the Biden administration’s hiring of those prosecutors on a permanent basis was an improper effort to protect them from being terminated.

“I will not tolerate subversive personnel actions by the previous Administration at any U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Bove wrote. “Too much is at stake. In light of the foregoing, the appropriate course is to terminate these employees.”

Bove added that the “resources allocated to their hiring” should be made available to Martin for “merit-based hiring.”

He also wrote that the Justice Department is investigating the Biden administration’s hiring of the prosecutors. That investigation, he said, stems from Trump’s executive order claiming to end “weaponization” by government agencies.

In endorsing the firings, Bove embraced Trump’s characterization of Jan. 6 prosecutions as a “grave national injustice,” a description that several federal judges have flatly rejected in recent orders related to those cases.

“There has been no ‘grave national injustice,’” U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman wrote in a Thursday ruling. “And just because the proclamation was signed by the president does not transform up into down or down into up as if peering through the looking glass of Alice in Wonderland.”