The ongoing purge of Justice Department officials who investigated President Trump and his allies continued this week, with the Justice Department firing more than 20 employees who worked on the investigations, sources told CBS News.
The firings, one source familiar with the terminations said, included more than 20 people who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s classified documents case against Mr. Trump and Smith’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn election results in 2020.
There have been at least 35 firings of Justice Department employees who worked for Smith on the two investigations he oversaw, and at least 15 more could be fired, the source said.
Sources told CBS News that among those fired were paralegals who worked for Smith’s office, finance and support staff, and two additional Justice Department prosecutors in North Carolina and Florida. Three other top Jan. 6 prosecutors were fired in June.
The staffers were identified by the Justice Department’s so-called “weaponization working group” which Attorney General Pam Bondi established as one of her first priorities after she was confirmed, one source said.
The attorney general established the “weaponization working group” to review Biden administration law enforcement policies, according to the source. The group is reviewing the two federal cases against Mr. Trump pursued by former special counsel Smith and is examining prosecutions of rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It is also reviewing the Trump legal cases in New York — the “hush money” trial pursued by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the civil enforcement action against the Trump Organization brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James — neither of which involved federal prosecutors.
As the Justice Department began collecting information about the FBI agents who worked on Jan. 6 investigations and fired career prosecutors who worked on the cases, Bondi said in her directive that the working group would investigate “improper investigative tactics and unethical prosecutions” versus “good faith actions by federal employees simply following orders.”
CBS News has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on the firings.
One of the staffers who has been fired was Patty Hartman, who served as a top public affairs specialist at the FBI and federal prosecutors’ offices. Hartman was fired Monday via a letter from the attorney general. She worked on the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney’s Office public affairs team that distributed news releases about the more than 1,500 Jan. 6 criminal prosecutions.
In an interview with CBS News, Hartman warned of a continuing wave of retribution inside the agency.
“The rules don’t exist anymore,” Hartman said. “There used to be a line, used to be a very distinct separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, because one should not interfere with the work of the other. That line is very definitely gone.”
The purge of Justice Department employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases began shortly after Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, when he installed a former Jan. 6 defense attorney, Ed Martin, as the acting top prosecutor in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Trump and his supporters have downplayed the damage, injuries and trauma of the Capitol siege and have sought to recast convicted rioters as “political prisoners.”
The mass pardon of nearly all of the approximately 1,500 defendants shuttered the prosecutions in January.
