WASHINGTON — The Justice Department lost more than 6,400 lawyers, agents and other employees over the past year through firings and voluntary departures, as the Trump administration removed career staff it viewed as insufficiently loyal or tied to prior Democratic administrations, according to The Associated Press, which interviewed more than a half-dozen fired employees and a network of department alumni.
Among those fired were counterterrorism prosecutors, Jan. 6 investigators, civil rights enforcers, immigration judges, an ethics officer and attorneys who defend administration policies in court. Attorney General Pam Bondi approaches her first year on the job with the terminations as a defining feature of her tenure.
The departures have stripped the department of what lawyers and former senior officials describe as centuries of combined institutional experience, leaving it with fewer career employees to serve as an independent check on executive power at a moment when the Trump administration is pursuing prosecutions of political opponents and testing the limits of executive authority.
“To lose people at that career level, people who otherwise intended to stay and now are either being discharged or themselves are walking away, is immensely damaging to the public interest,” said Stuart Gerson, who served as a senior official in the George H.W. Bush administration and as acting attorney general early in the Clinton administration. “We’re losing really capable people, people who have never viewed themselves as political and attempted to do the right thing.”
Peter Keisler, a senior official in the George W. Bush Justice Department, said the wave of terminations was “completely unprecedented in both its scale and scope and underlying motivation.”
A firing delivered at a red light
Michael Ben’Ary spent more than two decades at the Justice Department prosecuting high-profile national security cases, including the murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and a suicide bomb plot targeting the U.S. Capitol. Most recently he was leading the prosecution stemming from the 2021 bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 American service members during the withdrawal from Afghanistan — a case President Donald Trump highlighted in his address to Congress.
On Oct. 1, Ben’Ary was driving one of his children to soccer practice when he paused at a red light to check his work phone. He found it had been disabled. The explanation arrived later in his personal email: he had been fired.
The termination appeared to follow a social media post by right-wing commentator Julie Kelly, who told hundreds of thousands of followers that Ben’Ary had previously served as a senior counsel to Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 Justice Department official under President Joe Biden. Kelly also suggested Ben’Ary was part of the “internal resistance” to prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey — even though, the AP reported, Ben’Ary was never involved in the Comey case.
The Kabul airport prosecution, once set for trial last month, has been postponed. Ben’Ary left a typed note near his office door reminding colleagues they had sworn an oath to follow the facts “without fear or favor” and “unhindered by political interference,” while warning that “the political leadership of the Department have violated these principles, jeopardizing our national security and making American citizens less safe.”
’Our dream was to be federal prosecutors’
Aliya Khalidi joined the department in 2023 as part of a group of prosecutors hired to handle the hundreds of cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. She watched those cases collapse when Trump granted sweeping clemency to all 1,500 defendants charged in connection with the attack.
Shortly after, she was preparing dinner one Friday evening when an email notified her she had lost her job — the result of a memo from then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who characterized the hiring of temporary prosecutors into permanent roles as “subversive personnel actions by the previous administration.” The memo did not name those being fired, leaving them to guess.
“The people working on these cases were not political agents of any kind,” Khalidi said. “It’s all people who just care about the rule of law.”
She and 14 fellow fired attorneys were directed to return their government equipment to the same room where they had gathered on their first day as prosecutors.
“For a lot of us, our dream was to be federal prosecutors,” Khalidi said. “And so we had happy memories of that room, of being excited on our first day. So it was just kind of surreal to be back there turning in our stuff.”
Anam Petit, an immigration judge hired during the Biden administration, learned she had been fired during a break between hearings on Sept. 5. She said she had received strong performance reviews and had already exceeded her case completion goal for the year. She returned to the courtroom to issue a pending decision.
“I just put my phone back in my pocket and went into the courtroom and delivered my decision, with a very shaky voice and shaky hands, trying to center myself back to that decision just so that I could relay it,” Petit said.
Fear among those who remain
The departures have reached across the department. More than 200 former Civil Rights Division employees signed an open letter of protest. The Public Integrity Section, which handles sensitive public corruption cases, has also been hollowed out by resignations.
Joseph Tirrell, the department’s former chief ethics officer, was fired in July — shortly before a FIFA Club World Cup final that he had advised Bondi she could not ethically attend on a free invitation. Reports later indicated Bondi attended in Trump’s box. The Justice Department said in a statement that none of Tirrell’s ethics advice “was ever overruled” and that “the Attorney General obtained ethics approval to attend this event in her official capacity as a member of the FIFA Task Force.”
“There’s a great deal of fear there just because I was fired and just because so many others were summarily fired,” Tirrell said. “Are you going to get fired because you provided ethics advice? Are you going to get fired because you have a pride flag on your desk?”
Maurene Comey, a New York prosecutor fired two weeks after completing a sex trafficking trial against Sean “Diddy” Combs, told colleagues in a farewell message that “fear is the tool of a tyrant.”
This past week, several prosecutors in Minnesota moved to resign amid turmoil over an investigation into the shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.
Operational consequences
The departures have caused case backlogs and staff shortages. Justice Connection, a network of department alumni, estimated that more than 230 lawyers, agents and other employees were fired, apparently because of their work on cases they were assigned, past criticism of Trump, or seemingly no reason.
The administration replaced the veteran U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide with no experience as a federal prosecutor, in an effort to secure indictments of Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. One judge later identified grave missteps in how Halligan presented the Comey case to a grand jury; another dismissed both prosecutions, calling Halligan’s appointment unlawful.
The Justice Department defended its record in a statement: “This is the most efficient Department of Justice in American history, and our attorneys will continue to deliver measurable results for the American people.” The department said it has hired more than 3,400 career attorneys since Trump took office and characterized the terminations of some employees as “consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”
Jack Smith, the former special counsel who investigated Trump and departed before he could be fired, told lawmakers the losses extended beyond individual cases.
“These are not partisans,” Smith said. “They just want to do good work, and I think when you lose that culture, you lose a lot.”
Ben’Ary’s farewell note closed with an appeal to those who remained: “Follow the facts and the law. Stand up for what we all believe in — our Constitution and the rule of law. Our country depends on you.”