The lawyer took the elevator 32 floors to the U.S. attorney’s office, where for eight years he had worked as a highly regarded prosecutor. He had a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies to share and some thoughts to keep to himself.
“You have to be polite,” the lawyer, Michael Gordon, explained as the elevator rose. “But I don’t want to minimize it, or make it seem like everything’s OK. It’s not.”
Mr. Gordon was heading up on this steaming late July day in Tampa, Fla., to collect his things and say goodbye. Three weeks earlier, and just two days after receiving yet another outstanding performance review, he had been interviewing a witness online when a grim-faced colleague interrupted to hand him a letter. It said he was being “removed from federal service effective immediately” — as in, now.
Although the brief letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, provided no justification, Mr. Gordon knew the likely reason: Jan. 6, 2021.
He was being fired for successfully prosecuting people who had stormed the United States Capitol that day — assaulting police officers, vandalizing a national landmark and disrupting that sacrosanct moment in a democracy, the transfer of presidential power.
He was being fired for doing his job.
The letter did more than inform Mr. Gordon, a 47-year-old father of two, that he was unemployed. It confirmed for him his view that the Justice Department he had been honored to work for was now helping to whitewash a traumatic event in American history, supporting President Trump’s reframing of its violence as patriotic — and those who had prosecuted rioters in the name of justice as villains, perhaps even traitors….
In the seven months since Mr. Trump, newly returned to the White House, granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged in the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history, his administration has turned the agency upside down….
To date, the Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen prosecutors who were assigned to hold the rioters accountable — roughly a quarter of the complement. Some were junior prosecutors, like Sara Levine, who had secured a guilty plea from a rioter who had grabbed a police officer. Others were veterans, including Greg Rosen, who had led the department’s Jan. 6 task force. Scores more prosecutors, involved in these and other cases, have left, either in fear of where the ax might next fall or out of sheer disgust.
The Justice Department declined to comment for this article, but a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, described the agency during the Biden administration as “a cabal of anti-Trump sycophants” engaged in a “relentless pursuit to throw the book at President Trump and his allies.” By “uprooting the foot soldiers,” Mr. Fields added, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Ms. Bondi, “is restoring the integrity of the department.”
And so Mr. Gordon. As the elevator climbed, he braced himself. In an interview the day before, he had talked about what had happened to him and many of his colleagues from the Justice Department’s once-vital and now-defunct Capitol Siege Section. Disbelief colored his every word.
“When you stand up in court and say, ‘Mike Gordon for the United States,’ you don’t say, ‘Mike Gordon for Donald Trump,’” he had said, adding: “I’m standing up there, and I’m speaking for the government. For all the people of the country.”…