Acting Attorney General James McHenry on Monday fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the two criminal investigations into Donald J. Trump for the special counsel Jack Smith, saying they could not be trusted to “faithfully implement” the president’s agenda, a Justice Department spokesman said.
The department did not name the prosecutors. But a person who worked with some members of Mr. Smith’s team said many of the firings appeared to target career lawyers and most likely violated civil service protections for nonpolitical employees.
The move was abrupt, but not unexpected: Mr. Trump had vowed to fire Mr. Smith as soon as he took office, but the special counsel and some of his top prosecutors quit before his inauguration. Others, however, returned to their old posts, including some assigned to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington.
The announcement kicked off a second week of convulsive change at a department Mr. Trump has vowed to dismantle and reconstruct, ushering in a new era of more direct White House control of federal law enforcement agencies.
The firings came just hours after the Trump team made a major personnel move that underscored their intention to remove any officials who might contradict their plans — reassigning the department’s most senior career official, a well-respected department employee responsible for some of the most sensitive cases, to a much less powerful post.
The transfer of Bradley Weinsheimer, the associate deputy attorney general, is part of a larger effort by the Trump team to exert greater direct control over the department.
It follows the reassignments of some of the department’s most experienced and highly regarded supervisors, including top officials with expertise in national security, international investigations, extraditions and public corruption. On Monday, one of them, the chief of the public integrity section, resigned.
It is not yet clear who will replace them.
The firings were earlier reported by Fox News.
Like many of the other officials who have received transfer emails, Mr. Weinsheimer has been given the option of transferring to the department’s sanctuary cities task force — an offer seen by some in the same situation as an effort to force them into quitting.
The transfer of Mr. Weinsheimer is the clearest sign yet that the Trump team is moving quickly to remove officials who might halt, delay or revise actions they deem inappropriate by political appointees.
Mr. Weinsheimer, a respected veteran of the department for three decades, played a critical role under multiple administrations, often acting as a critical arbiter of ethical issues or interactions that required a neutral referee.
He was appointed to his current role on an interim basis by Attorney Jeff Sessions in July 2018 during Mr. Trump’s first term, a move that was made permanent by a successor to Mr. Sessions, William P. Barr.
Mr. Weinsheimer also served four years in the department’s office of professional responsibility, which investigates complaints about prosecutors. An email to his government account was not immediately returned.
In 2021, Mr. Weinsheimer cleared the way for former Trump administration officials to testify before Congress about the president’s actions after the 2020 elections — over the objection of the Trump legal team. But transcripts showed that he tried to strictly limit the scope of questioning, to the ire of Democratic committee staff members.
Mr. Weinsheimer also ran point for the department in a testy series of exchanges with President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lawyers over the inclusion of the highly damaging assessment of the former president’s mental acuity contained in the special counsel report on Mr. Biden’s handling of classified information.
The resignation of the head of the Justice Department’s public integrity section on Monday put into stark relief the effect of the Trump administration’s reassignment of career officials.
The chief, Corey Amundson, was informed in recent days that he would be reassigned to work on immigration. Mr. Amundson was one of many senior career officials told he was being sent to work on a task force focused on sanctuary cities — jurisdictions that are expected to be reluctant to comply with administration officials trying to ramp up deportations and immigration arrests.
In his resignation letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Amundson recounted the many significant corruption cases he oversaw in his 26 years at the department.
“I spent my entire professional life committed to the apolitical enforcement of federal criminal law and to ensuring that those around me understood and embraced that central tenet of our work,” he wrote in his resignation letter to the acting attorney general, James R. McHenry. “I am proud of my service and wish you the best in seeking justice on behalf of the American people.”
He added that he wished the department well as it pursued Mr. Trump’s agenda, “including to protect all Americans from the scourge of violent crime and public corruption.”
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