When the White House fired a federal prosecutor last week in Los Angeles, it could’ve been dismissed as an isolated case, with the administration targeting a one-time Democratic congressional candidate who had slammed President Trump on the campaign trail.
But in the days since, it’s become clear the dismissal is part of a broader campaign against Trump’s perceived enemies that has roiled the Justice Department and some of the nation’s highest-powered law firms.
Last Friday, the White House terminated Adam Schleifer, an assistant U.S. attorney on the corporate and securities fraud strike force who had been leading an investigation into a pro-Trump business executive. After The Times reported on the matter, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement that said the Justice Department had eliminated at least 50 U.S. attorneys and deputies nationwide in the past few weeks.
“The American people deserve a judicial branch full of honest arbiters of the law who want to protect democracy, not subvert it,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt did not explain how those fired were allegedly subverting democracy, and White House officials didn’t respond to requests for more information.
Trump has authority over federal prosecutors because U.S. attorney’s offices are part of the Department of Justice, which falls under the executive branch, not the judicial branch. While it is normal for U.S. attorneys, who are political appointees, to resign or be forced out when a new administration takes power, several lawyers said line prosecutors like Schleifer are career employees who can only be terminated for poor performance or misconduct.
By firing an individual prosecutor with an email that sources said was “on behalf of President Donald J. Trump,” the White House took a norm-shattering step that might be illegal and could cripple the independence of individual prosecutors throughout the Department of Justice if repeated, according to several current and former prosecutors. The sources familiar with Schleifer’s firing, along with several others who spoke to The Times, requested anonymity citing concerns about backlash.
The White House and U.S. Department of Justice have not said exactly why Schleifer was fired. Both Schleifer and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles declined to comment.
Multiple federal law enforcement sources said they suspect Schleifer’s firing was tied to critical comments he made about Trump during his congressional campaign and his prosecution of a fast-food CEO who donated roughly $40,000 to Trump and Republican causes in recent years.
Connie Woodhead, a 30-year veteran of the Department of Justice and former first assistant U.S. attorney in the office where Schleifer worked, called the circumstances of his departure “unprecedented.”
“I think it’s extremely chilling… especially without further explanation, for any assistant U.S. attorney charging anyone who might be a friend of the [Trump] administration, or a donor to the administration,” she said.
Trump’s team has made no secret of his intention to rid the government of employees who have challenged the president or his allies and their interests. An hour before Schleifer was fired, Laura Loomer, who has at times served as an advisor to Trump, began calling for his ouster on social media. Loomer later celebrated the firing on X on Saturday, stating that “Biden holdovers who openly express bias against President Trump” should all be fired.
The job of assistant U.S. attorney is not typically glamorous, involving the mundane but crucial legal grunt work of prosecuting all manner of federal crimes, ranging from white-collar scams to international narcotics conspiracies and public corruption. It has been a career launching point for many prominent legal figures, with major law firms frequently poaching the top talent. Retaining the best prosecutors, whose casework is largely apolitical, has been a longstanding challenge for the government.
Several former federal prosecutors said the firing of an assistant U.S. attorney would normally be a laborious process that involves the employee’s supervisor and higher-ups at their district office. A prosecutor might be put on a “performance improvement plan,” for instance, before termination was even considered.
“Career prosecutors who are past their probationary status have public service protections. That ordinarily means that before one of them could get fired, there would be a long, well-documented process,” said Carley Palmer, a former supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles who is now a partner at Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg LLP. “To fire someone who is past their probationary period is hard to do.”
Multiple sources told The Times over the weekend that Joseph T. McNally, the acting U.S. attorney for Los Angeles, was not involved in the decision to terminate Schleifer. The sources, who were not authorized publicly and feared reprisals, suspected Schleifer’s firing was motivated, in part, by a case he was assigned involving Andrew Wiederhorn, former chief executive of the company that owns fast-food chains Fatburger and Johnny Rockets.
A grand jury indicted Wiederhorn last May on charges that he hid taxable income from the federal government by disbursing “shareholder loans” from the company to himself and his family, money which was then used for personal gain. He has pleaded not guilty.
Wiederhorn’s lawyers have aggressively pushed Justice Department officials to drop the case, according to two sources. The case against Wiederhorn, who donated approximately $40,000 to Trump’s political action committees and the Republican National Committee in the last two years, is still pending in federal court. The defense team did not respond to a request for comment following Schleifer’s dismissal.
Beyond the Wiederhorn case, there are also concerns that Schleifer was targeted for political reasons. Schleifer made several unflattering remarks about Trump when he ran for an open congressional seat in New York’s 17th District in 2020. In one 2020 tweet, Schleifer accused Trump of eroding constitutional integrity “every day with every lie and every act of heedless, narcissistic corruption.”
One of Schleifer’s former colleagues said that despite his political ambitions outside the office, he focused only on the law when he came to work.
“He is very smart. He’s hardworking. And he is impartial. He judges cases based on the evidence,” Woodhead said. “He was apolitical in the office.”
Schleifer left his post during his 2020 political campaign but was hired back to the office ahead of Biden’s inauguration in 2021 by former U.S. Atty. Nicola Hanna, a Trump appointee. Hanna is now part of Wiederhorn’s defense team. None of Wiederhorn’s attorneys have responded to requests for comment from The Times.
Schleifer’s firing appears to be just the latest case roiling the Justice Department.
Reagan Fondren, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, was also fired recently in a one-line email from the White House, according to the Daily Memphian. Fondren could not immediately be reached for comment.
Adam Cohen, director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, wrote last month on LinkedIn that he was abruptly fired after more than 26 years pursuing “old school mobsters, street gang members, cartel bosses, terrorists” and others for the Justice Department in Washington.
“Putting bad guys in jail was as apolitical as it gets,” Cohen wrote. “I served under five Presidents and 11 Attorneys General… my personal politics were never relevant.”
In January, more than a dozen prosecutors were fired after working on criminal cases against Trump. That included Gregory Bernstein, who worked in the Major Frauds Section of the U.S. attorney’s office in L.A.
Bernstein had previously aided special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into allegations that Trump mishandled classified documents after leaving office and fostered an insurrection with lies about the results of the 2020 election. Bernstein declined an interview request.
The special counsel prosecutors each received a letter from the Justice Department stating that given their “significant role” in prosecuting Trump, “I do not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully.”
Those attorneys have since retained counsel and challenged the legality of the firings through an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which bills itself as an independent, quasi-judicial agency in the executive branch. Palmer said if the board doesn’t overturn Schleifer and Bernstein’s firings, they will likely have to sue in federal court to get their jobs back.
Jack Smith was among hundreds of former Justice Department lawyers who signed a February open letter to career federal prosecutors that expressed “alarm” over recent actions by the department’s leadership. The letter followed the Justice Department’s order to dismiss corruption charges against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, despite high-level prosecutors from both ends of the political spectrum resigning in protest of that order.
“We were taught to pursue justice without fear or favor, and knew our decisions to investigate and charge should be based only on the facts and the law,” the letter stated. “We knew these values were more than just requirements in a manual — they were foundational to a fair and just legal system. And we upheld them no matter who was President.”
Current and former federal prosecutors have raised concerns over the ability of fired federal prosecutors to find work in the private sector after Trump issued several executive orders targeting firms who had ties to some of his political enemies, including ex-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 election.
Although district court judges have ruled some of the Trump orders targeting law firms are likely unconstitutional, some firms have sought to appease him.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP — which has a partner that once tried to build a criminal case against Trump while working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office — agreed to contribute $40 million in legal services to causes Trump supports, including “the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects.”
The firm, which reportedly employs about 2,000 people, also agreed to audit its hiring practices and pledged to “not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.”