The Trump administration fired several prosecutors on Friday who were involved in the highly politicized prosecutions of January 6 Capitol protesters. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove also directed acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll to provide a complete list of agents who worked on January 6 cases by Wednesday evening, while eight senior FBI officials were dismissed immediately.
Bove ordered the firings of these January 6 prosecutors—many of whom had publicly expressed their disdain for President Trump and his supporters on MSNBC—just days after Trump pardoned over 1,500 January 6 prisoners and defendants. The dismissed prosecutors were part of the extensive, four-year investigation that involved heavily armed FBI agents raiding the homes of Trump supporters for non-violent offenses.
More than 600 protesters were charged with felony “obstruction of an official proceeding,” a controversial charge based on laws created after the Enron corruption scandal. The statute had never been used to prosecute political protesters before and was eventually dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite this, hundreds of Trump supporters were convicted of felony charges and sentenced to lengthy prison terms for conduct that amounted to misdemeanor trespassing. Even those who were not convicted of the false felony charge and were instead found guilty of minor misdemeanors faced federal prison sentences, a punishment that was not used much at all prior to the January 6 cases.
No similar investigation was initiated to round up individuals who protested on government property and attacked the White House during the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. Pro-Palestine protesters—many of whom trespassed in federal buildings and disrupted sessions of Congress—were also spared from the aggressive prosecution faced by January 6 protesters. In total, approximately two dozen federal prosecutors involved in the January 6 cases were dismissed on Friday. Acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin instructed employees to preserve all documents and communications related to the cases as a formal investigation is underway.
In a separate memo, Bove ordered acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll to compile a list of all agents who worked on January 6 cases and raids. This could involve thousands of agents, as arrests related to January 6 were made in nearly every state. In the memo titled “Terminations,” Bove laid out that the “subversive” employees cannot be trusted to carry out President Trump’s agenda. “This memorandum sets forth a series of directives, authorized by the Acting Attorney General, regarding personnel matters to be addressed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Bove wrote.
The deputy attorney general then instructed Driscoll to fire eight employees by 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, February 3. “I do not believe that the current leadership of the Justice Department can trust these FBI employees to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” Bove, a former defense lawyer, wrote in the memo.
