Trump’s WH Directly Fires Two Prosecutors In Stunning Escalation Of War On DOJ Independence

In another brazen step to weed out President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies and break down the barrier of political influence between the White House and the DOJ, Trump’s White House directly dismissed two career prosecutors without reason. 

The firings are representative of Trump’s vow to retaliate against  his supposed political enemies in a department he claims has been “weaponized” against him. 

On Friday Los Angeles based federal prosecutor Adam Schleifer was fired via email from a White House official, with no reason for the dismissal given, according to reporting from the New York Times. 

Schleifer had been working on a case against the founder of Fatburger, Andrew Wiederhorn, who was also a donor to political action committees that have supported Trump, per the Times.

Shortly before he was fired, right-wing political activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, posted on X, highlighting old social media posts from 2020 where Schleifer was critical of Trump. 

“Why is Biden holdover @AdamSchleiferNY Adam Schleifer still working for the US Attorney’s office under the new Trump administration? He is a Trump hater who has been working at the US Attorney’s office since 2021,” Loomer wrote on X. “Fire him. He supported the impeachment of President Trump and said he wanted to repeal Trump’s tax plan.”

“We need to purge the US Attorney’s office of all leftist Trump haters,” Loomer added. 

Also last week, career attorney Reagan Fondren was similarly dismissed as acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee and from the DOJ, according to reporting from the Daily Memphian. She also received the news via a one line email. 

In a statement on Friday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said that Joe Murphy would replace Fondren, saying that Memphis is in need of “a U.S. Attorney who will return to increased caseloads, aggressively enforce our federal criminal laws, and keep violent offenders behind bars so that Memphians can feel safe again.”

And in a statement to TPM regarding the dismissals, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The White House, in coordination with the Department of Justice, has dismissed more than 50 U.S. Attorneys and Deputies 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.”

It is worth noting that prosecutors are part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch. 

These recent dismissals are only the latest of several retaliatory purges within Trump’s DOJ.

Since February, according to New York Magazine, over 20 officials involved in the January 6 prosecutions and criminal prosecutions against Trump have been fired from the Justice Department and several have resigned in protest. 

Earlier this month, the head of the FBI’s New York field office was forced to resign from his position after resisting the department’s order to go after officials involved in January 6 prosecutions. 

And in February, a federal prosecutor in charge of the criminal division in the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office resigned after refusing to follow an order to freeze assets of a Biden administration-era grant initiative.