Justice Department fires lawyers who worked on investigations into Donald Trump

More than a dozen people have been fired abruptly in a moment of sweet vengeance Donald Trump had been craving for years.

America’s Department of Justice has abruptly fired more than a dozen people who worked on its investigations into Donald Trump.

Acting Attorney-General James McHenry, who will shortly be replaced by Mr Trump’s nominee to hold the position permanently, Pam Bondi, informed the staff members in question that they were losing their jobs, The Washington Post reports.

A spokesman for the department confirmed that “several” people “who played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump” had been sacked.

“In light of their actions, the Acting Attorney-General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda,” the spokesman said.

“This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponisation of government.”

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The Justice Department built two cases against Mr Trump during his period as a private citizen, before he won November’s election. The first concerned his efforts to overturn the result of the previous election, which he lost to Joe Biden. The second focused on his retention of sensitive government documents after leaving office.

Both teams were led by special counsel Jack Smith, who resigned before Mr Trump took office earlier this month. About 40 lawyers, in total, took part; it is unclear precisely how many of them are now unemployed.

Jack Smith ran the twin prosecutions of Mr Trump. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

The fired staff learned of their fate via a letter from Mr McHenry.

“The proper functioning of government critically depends on the trust superior officials place in their subordinates,” he noted.

“I do not believe that the leadership of the department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully.”

Top prosecutor still ‘stands behind’ Trump cases

On his way out the door, Mr Smith delivered his team’s final report into Mr Trump’s conduct, significant parts of which have been released after attempts, from the President’s legal team, to keep the whole thing out of public view.

The report is divided into two volumes, each dealing with one of the cases.

Mr Smith stressed his belief that the evidence in both cases was sufficiently strong to convict Mr Trump, if either of them had gone to trial. However, Mr Trump’s return to office made it impossible for prosecutors to move forward.

Mr Smith believes Mr Trump could have been convicted in both cases. Now, of course, we will never know. Picture: Ryan M. Kelly/AFP

“While I relied greatly on the counsel, judgment, and advice of our team, I want it to be

clear that the ultimate decision to bring charges against Mr Trump was mine,” Mr Smith wrote in the report’s initial pages.

“It is a decision I stand behind fully. To have done otherwise on the facts developed during our work would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and a public servant.

“It is equally important for me to make clear that nobody within the Department of Justice

ever sought to interfere with, or improperly influence, my prosecutorial decision making.

“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.

“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.”

The election interference case

Volume one of the report concerns Mr Trump’s alleged “efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power” after he lost in 2020.

Mr Biden won that election in early November, but was not inaugurated until mid-January. During the intervening months Mr Trump tried, in various ways, to engineer a way to remain in power.

He launched more than 60 lawsuits in both state and federal court, alleging widespread voter fraud and seeking to change or nullify the results.

In Pennsylvania, for example, the outgoing president’s legal team sought to throw out large swathes of votes from populous, and heavily Democratic, Philadelphia. A similar pattern was repeated across the other key swing states where Mr Trump had lost.

Donald Trump. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

None of these cases went anywhere. Judges (including, we should note, several conservative judges appointed by Mr Trump himself) overwhelmingly found them to be baseless or, at best, based on extraordinarily thin evidence.

In some instances, to Mr Trump’s immense chagrin, his lawyers failed to establish that they had standing – that they had a right, under the law, to even bring the case in question before the court. If a plaintiff doesn’t have that right, the case fails without clearing even the first hurdle, and everything else becomes irrelevant.

That happened repeatedly to Mr Trump, leading to his favoured excuse for the cases being thrown out en masse: that the evidence was on his side but all these judges, for presumably corrupt or biased reasons, had refused to even listen to it.

In truth, the Trump legal team received a great many opportunities to put forward its evidence, and couldn’t offer anything substantive.

Still, that’s all legal. Mr Smith’s team was not going after Mr Trump for filing spurious lawsuits, but for his other actions in the post-election period, which it felt were illegal.

“When it became clear that Mr Trump had lost the election and that lawful means of challenging the election results had failed, he resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power,” the special counsel alleged in his report.

“This included attempts to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force Justice Department officials and his own vice president, to act in contravention of their oaths and to instead advance Mr Trump’s personal interests; and on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.”

The 2020 electoral map. Mr Trump's efforts to change the result focused on states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

The final iteration of Mr Trump’s scheme, which culminated in the Capitol riot, involved convincing his vice president Mike Pence, who in his role as president of the Senate presided over the certification of Mr Biden’s win, to unilaterally reject the results from certain states.

Mr Pence did not have the power to do this, as he himself noted at the time. Consider: if that power did exist, then this time around Kamala Harris could have thrown out the results from a few key states she had lost, stopping Congress from certifying her own defeat to Mr Trump.

Nevertheless, Mr Trump insisted Mr Pence was wrong and didn’t have the necessary “courage” to act, which is why you heard rioters chanting about hanging him. They believed he had betrayed the president.

The next stage of the plan, once some states’ results were tossed, would have seen to send an alternative slate of electors for each, giving their electoral votes to Mr Trump instead.

The Smith team alleged this whole scheme was illegal, including Mr Trump’s part in it.

The government documents case

Volume two of the report is not publicly available; its release has been blocked by a federal judge on the basis that it could prejudice multiple defendants.

We do, however, know the basic facts at issue.

When he left office after his first term, Mr Trump took batches of government documents, some of them highly classified, and stored them at his personal residences in Florida and New Jersey. Prosecutors alleged he had initially rebuffed the government’s attempts to retrieve these documents, then that he’d lied, claiming he had returned all of them when he actually hadn’t.

The saga exploded into controversy when the FBI raided Mr Trump’s Florida residence, the Mar-a-Lago resort, in search of the remaining documents.

Mr Trump allegedly stored classified documents at two of his golf clubs. Picture: Will McNamee/Getty Images/AFP

In his response to the case, Mr Trump repeatedly insisted the documents were his personal property, meaning he had every right to keep them. He also claimed to have used his power as president to declassify them before taking them from the White House, though no evidence existed that such an order had ever been issued.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, maintained that the documents were government property, and that as a private citizen Mr Trump was in possession of them illegally.

Their indictment alleged Mr Trump failed to return the documents when repeatedly asked, showed some of them to people who lacked the necessary security clearances, defied a subpoena and lied to investigators.

Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case last year, ruling that Mr Smith’s appointment as special counsel had violated a clause of the US Constitution, and therefore the whole prosecution was invalid.

The government was in the process of appealing when Mr Trump won the election. Obviously the case against him will now go nowhere.

Originally published as Justice Department fires lawyers who worked on investigations into Donald Trump