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.
Donald Trump has vowed to “make America safe again,” with a particular focus on D.C., which he has called “a filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation,” despite violent crime hitting a record low in 30 years in 2024.
Yet he’s in the process of gutting the institution charged with prosecuting crime in the nation’s capital.
“It basically breaks the whole system they have,” Sara Levine, who also lost her assistant U.S. attorney job 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.”
The purge isn’t over. Over the weekend, Bloomberg reported that the Justice Department gave all 93 U.S. attorneys until Feb. 10 to defend their recent hires as in line with Trump’s agenda on crime and immigration.
The 15 Jan. 6 prosecutors who were let go last week were also recent hires, having been converted from their probationary status to full civil service status during the closing weeks of the Biden administration.
Most of those who were fired had already been reassigned to misdemeanor cases in D.C. Superior Court and had just wrapped up three weeks of “basic training” to prosecute assaults and drug trafficking.
When the messy termination began Friday afternoon, Sean Brennan, who had spent nearly two years as a frontline prosecutor on Jan. 6 cases, said he had already been introduced via text message to a domestic violence victim in an ongoing case. He now calls the feeling “a knife in the gut.”
Levine was already getting copied on emails to prepare for cases this week.
Levine previously spent eight years prosecuting violent crime and drug cases as a deputy county attorney in southern Arizona, where many of them had ties to the U.S.-Mexico border.
She told NOTUS she could have leveraged her experience and been exactly the kind of prosecutor Trump and his allies claim to want.
“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 said.
The incoming junior prosecutors were supposed to relieve current D.C. prosecutors, who would have moved up to fill vacancies as more senior attorneys retired.
A third ex-prosecutor, who spoke to NOTUS on condition of anonymity given safety concerns and exposure to pardoned Jan. 6 rioters, said he’d just wrapped up training when he received a Friday afternoon text from a local prosecutor who advised him to “rest up” over the weekend so he could be ready to work on criminal cases together.
An hour later, he texted back that he’d just been fired.
“It was incredibly painful and tense. 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,” he said.
In many ways, the Jan. 6 prosecutors were not surprised they were the first targets. Edward Martin Jr., a conservative lawyer who once led the Missouri Republican Party and now sits atop the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., spent years championing the same rioters who’d been held accountable by the attorneys he now oversees.
The first prosecutors who were fired did what they were told to do: investigate rioters, collect evidence, determine whether a crime was committed, then prosecute the ones who clearly broke the law. All were part of the Capitol Siege Section, a special team that was specifically put together for this one mission.
“We were probably low-hanging fruit. It’s much easier to fire us than to fire people that had prosecuted cases that had been in the federal government for a longer time. They took the easy route, and I think it sends a message,” Levine said.
But the confusion and chaos around their exits indicates what’s to come, they said — even as the administration claims to be ensuring that staff is on mission.
“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. 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,” Brennan said. “I don’t think we’re going to be the last ones.”
Several of the attorneys spent the weekend privately reaching out to FBI special agents across the country, who they’d heard were also in fear for their jobs.
Emil Bove, the new DOJ head who pushed out the Jan. 6 prosecutors, has been gunning for those at the law enforcement bureau who worked on these cases. FBI agents were forced to answer a survey about their roles in these investigations on Monday, sparking two federal lawsuits in the nation’s capital. They warned that releasing those names would be tantamount to a hit list for pardoned insurrectionists.
“A job’s a job. But a job is also an identity and gives a sense of purpose,” one of the fired prosecutors said. “I loved being a federal prosecutor. I did it well, and we achieved a huge number of convictions. Every day we came in, we were committed to this role. We were hired to explicitly do this job. It’s a betrayal of the public service we’ve dedicated our lives to. Some people in my class were veterans. Some people moved from across the country. We gave a lot and we were betrayed.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.