Trump personally ordered firings of special counsel prosecutors

The US justice department fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the criminal cases against Donald Trump hours after the president directly ordered it to take place in the Oval Office, according to two people familiar with the intervention.

The move to purge people who worked for former special counsel Jack Smith had ostensibly come from the acting attorney general James McHenry, who sent the formal termination notices that said they could not be trusted to implement Trump’s agenda.

But the genesis for the firings was Trump himself, according to two people directly familiar with the matter, and a demonstration of Trump’s unchecked power as he implements a new order where the justice department is answerable to the White House.

The end goal of Trump’s team is for the president to have at his disposal a justice department that plays a leading role in enforcing his wishes and doing his bidding, under their version of a unitary executive, where the president directs every agency.

Trump’s intervention to remove the prosecutors in Smith’s office was seen by some of his’s advisers as the start of their efforts to make it normal practice to have the attorney general work with the West Wing to enforce and enact its political agenda.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

After Trump instructed his advisers that he wanted the prosecutors gone, the White House presidential personnel office, led by longtime Trump ally Sergio Gor, issued a memo that directed the justice department to proceed and gave the move a degree of legal cover.

The memo was then sent to the acting attorney general’s office, which issued the actual termination notices to those still at the department. The precise number is unclear because the department did not release names, but the trial team consisted of at least 18 lawyers.

The justice department has gone through seismic change in the first days of Trump’s second term, with top officials demoted out of the deputy attorney general’s office and ousted from top positions in key components including the criminal, civil and national security divisions.

Once the wider purges are completed, the expectation is for lawyers loyal to Trump to be installed in the vacancies. They could end up serving there for years, putting their own stamp on the department and transforming its future legal ideology to be aligned with Trump’s agenda.

The personnel changes have come in waves: first it was the heads of the national security division and the public integrity section, which Trump has blamed for pushing to open the criminal cases into his mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Next have been the career lawyers in the deputy attorney general’s office, including the top non-political official Brad Weinsheimer, who had been appointed on an interim basis by Trump’s first attorney general Jeff Sessions, until it was made permanent by Trump’s last attorney general Bill Barr.

But Weinsheimer had the misfortune to have been one of two people Trump’s lawyers met with in 2023, when they had tried and failed to get a meeting with then attorney general Merrick Garland, in an effort to stave off an indictment in the classified documents case.

The Trump White House then sent the memo to fire any remaining members of Smith’s team on Monday, a particularly aggressive move because they too were career prosecutors who in theory had civil service protections from being fired on politically-charged grounds.

In the weeks ahead, in another instance of the White House directing parts of the justice department, the fired special counsel prosecutors are expected to face bruising scrutiny in a politically-charged investigation.

Trump last week signed an executive order tasking the attorney general to produce a report about “weaponization of the federal government” that is all but certain to encompass the special counsel cases and submit the findings to the deputy chief of staff for policy – at the White House.