How Trump is changing the Justice Department
About a dozen Justice Department employees who worked for former special counsel Jack Smith on the investigation and prosecution of President Trump are being fired, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to CBS News. The federal prosecutors were informed of the decision to terminate their positions via a letter sent over email after Justice Department leadership determined they were unable to carry out Mr. Trump’s agenda.
“Acting Attorney General James McHenry made this decision because he did not believe these officials could be trusted to faithfully implement the president’s agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president,” a Justice Department official told CBS News.
Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022 and took over two ongoing investigations of the president, one related to his handling of classified records and the other tied to his conduct following the 2020 presidential election.
Both cases were dismissed after Mr. Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Smith informed the judges overseeing the cases that Justice Department policy forbids the prosecution of a sitting president.
Throughout his probes, the former special counsel amassed a staff of prosecutors and agents to conduct grand jury investigations and try the cases in court. It is not immediately clear which members of Smith’s team were fired, but the move makes good on a Trump campaign promise to clean house in the Justice Department. Last week, the president signed an executive order to take on the “weaponization of the federal government,” a characterization he applied to Smith’s prosecutions.
Fox News was first to report on the firings.
The news of the firings came on the same day that Washington, D.C.’s top federal prosecutor launched an internal review of the charging decisions behind hundreds of Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot cases. Two people familiar with the move confirmed to CBS News that Acting U.S. Attorney Edward Martin ordered prosecutors in his office to turn in documents, emails and other information related to the previous administration’s decision to bring an obstruction charge against more than 200 Capitol attack defendants.
The cases at issue are those in which defendants were charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge that the Supreme Court later ruled was too broadly applied by federal prosecutors.
Throughout the sprawling Jan. 6 investigation that abruptly came to an end last week after President Trump pardoned more than 1,500 individuals, defendants and their attorneys brought challenges against the obstruction case on multiple fronts as they contested the Justice Department’s application of the law in the Capitol riot cases. The Supreme Court ultimately limited prosecutors’ use of the statute.
The new review is set to examine the decision making behind the use of that charge, the people said.
News of the review was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Smith — who resigned from his position following the completion of his investigation — wrote in his report on the probe that his team had collected evidence “sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” if the case involving Mr. Trump’s alleged conduct around the 2020 election had gone to trial.
Only the first volume of Smith’s report, which described the investigation into Mr. Trump’s post-2020 election conduct, was released to the public. The second volume is currently shielded from public view while an appeal in the classified documents case is ongoing.
In the report, Smith defended his work as apolitical. And in a letter accompanying the final draft, he wrote, “To all who know me well, the claim from Mr. Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable.”
Mr. Trump called Smith “desperate” and “deranged” and consistently denied wrongdoing throughout the investigations.
Also on Monday, the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section resigned from his position after being reassigned, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CBS News. The official was appointed to the position during the first Trump administration, and his political corruption unit later advised Smith on various aspects of cases against Mr. Trump, according to court documents.
NBC News first reported the resignation. The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Last week, numerous career Justice Department officials who held high-profile positions were reassigned. The officials affected included senior criminal and national security leaders within two of the department’s most critical sections, two sources told CBS News at the time. The career officials have handled numerous high-profile investigations across administrations.
Robert Legare is a CBS News multiplatform reporter and producer covering the Justice Department, federal courts and investigations. He was previously an associate producer for the “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell.”
