President Trump's Justice Department is firing dozens of career prosecutors, sparking alarm among his critics.
Critics have accused Trump of a troubling departure from established norms with his sweeping shakeup of the DOJ, which has played a central role in Trump's political career, mainly as an antagonist, until now.
Trump's rise as a politician led Democrats to embrace the justice system as a defense of "our democracy," as Democrats welcomed criminal investigations into Trump in an effort to derail his political ambitions.
Attorney general Pam Bondi has fired several prosecutors who were involved in Special Counsel Jack Smith's politically explosive investigations of Trump in 2024.
Smith's efforts divided the nation, with some cheering Smith as a warrior for justice and others condemning him as a political hatchet man.
Trump recently quipped about his reversal of fortunes since becoming president again, remarking, "I was the hunted, and now I'm the hunter."
After the FBI spent years pursuing Trump, the agency has turned to targeting his critics, such as James Comey and John Brennan, and the DOJ is purging employees with little explanation.
Justice Connection, a new group formed to protect career employees who feel threatened by the new administration, estimates that over 200 have been fired.
"The senseless terminations at the Justice Department are growing exponentially. The very institution created to enforce the law is trampling over the civil service laws enacted by Congress. It’s shameful, and it’s devastating the workforce,” Stacey Young, executive director and founder of the group, said in a statement to The Hill.
One of the prosecutors who was fired without explanation, Maureen Comey, is the daughter of FBI director James Comey, a notorious Trump critic.
In a letter to her colleagues, Maureen Comey cast her firing as an arbitrary act of revenge and cast Trump as a "tyrant" who is threatening the rule of law. Comey urged her colleagues to do their jobs "without fear of favor."
“Our focus was really on acting ‘without favor.’ That is, making sure people with access, money, and power were not treated differently than anyone else; and making sure this office remained separate from politics and focused only on the facts and the law,” Comey said in the memo.
Skepticism of impartial justice has long animated Trump's movement, with many seeing Trump as the victim of a witch hunt spurred on by critics including Maureen's father, who notoriously declined to pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton despite her illegal use of an e-mail server to send top secret information.
The Trump administration has also fired immigration judges, and at least one state judge in Wisconsin is facing criminal charges for helping an illegal alien evade the law.
