The Justice Department fired dozens of prosecutors who worked on criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Politico reports. Interim Washington D.C., U.S. Attorney Ed Martin emailed the employees just before 5 p.m. Friday, citing a memo from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove describing an effort to root out employees the Trump administration considers improperly hired by the outgoing Biden administration. 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 moved to different offices.
During the four-year criminal investigation of the Jan. 6 attack, the Justice Department enlisted hundreds of prosecutors from across the U.S. to handle 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. 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 after the 2024 election. Bove implied that the Biden administration’s hiring of those prosecutors on a permanent basis was an improper effort to protect them from being terminated. He wrote that the Justice Department is investigating the Biden administration’s hiring of the prosecutors, stemming from President Trump’s executive order to end “weaponization” by government agencies. Bove cited Trump’s characterization of Jan. 6 prosecutions as a “grave national injustice,” a description that federal judges have rejected in orders related to those cases. “There has been no ‘grave national injustice,’” said U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman. “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.”
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