The ouster on Friday of the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of President Trump’s most-reviled adversaries was a huge blow to the Justice Department’s teetering tradition of independence, showing how far Mr. Trump has gone in exerting personal control over the institution.
The way in which the prosecutor, Erik S. Siebert, was abruptly forced from his post atop the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia deepened troubling questions that have arisen in recent months about the politicization of the Justice Department’s supposedly self-governing satellite offices. But it also raised a blunter and more immediate issue: Which of the nation’s U.S. attorneys might be next?
Beyond their efforts to push out Mr. Siebert, whose inquiries into Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, effectively fizzled out, administration officials have also ramped up pressure against Kelly O. Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Ms. Hayes, a career prosecutor who has spent more than a decade in that office, is leading inquiries into two other vocal critics of Mr. Trump: Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who has been accused of mortgage fraud by Mr. Trump’s allies; and John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, who is facing scrutiny over allegations of mishandling classified information.
Recently, Ms. Hayes told associates that she was under no illusions of the pressure she would face if she refused to bring a case she believed to be unsupported by evidence, as Mr. Siebert did, according to people with knowledge of those conversations. And while she signed off last month on asking for a warrant to search Mr. Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., she has indicated that should would not bring charges against Mr. Schiff unless her team discovered evidence to support them.
Mr. Trump’s campaign against U.S. attorneys, who oversee offices in 93 federal districts across the country, is an extension, even an escalation, of the early purge that his top political appointees carried out at the Justice Department headquarters and the F.B.I. against those who worked on the criminal cases brought against him before he returned to power.
Given that these prosecutors’ offices are where federal cases are filed on a day-to-day basis, the move strikes at the nuts-and-bolts foundations of the criminal justice system. It seems intended both to create a frictionless path for prosecutions of those who have run afoul of Mr. Trump, and perhaps to provide the White House with a tool it could use to set aside or slow cases it would like to see disappear.
White House interference in the work of U.S. attorneys was once considered such a taboo that former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who served under President George W. Bush, resigned in scandal after the Justice Department fired nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 for what were perceived to be political reasons.
But Mr. Trump’s reaction to Mr. Siebert’s ouster could not have been more different.
Several people, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and the president’s former defense lawyer, lobbied hard to keep Mr. Siebert in place, arguing that he had been an efficient and cooperative partner on immigration and crime enforcement in Washington’s southern suburbs.
But Mr. Trump responded to repeated entreaties by saying, “I don’t care,” according to a person with knowledge of the matter. His position seemed to be that he had been warned several times during his first term about firing U.S. attorneys, given that it could have put him in jeopardy, and he ended up being investigated after leaving office anyhow, the person said.
While U.S. attorneys are appointed by, and serve at the pleasure of, the president, they like to think of themselves as having some measure of professional autonomy, said Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Detroit who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. That sense of independence largely arises from measures put in place in the 1970s, after the Watergate scandal, dictating that partisan politics should never play a role in a prosecutor’s decision-making process.
“U.S. attorneys pride themselves on saying that we act without fear or favor,” Ms. McQuade said. “But if you see other U.S. attorneys getting fired for failing to comply with orders from the White House, well, that could lead to fear. And if you are letting someone off the hook for political reasons, well, that is favor. Both are inappropriate.”
Mr. Siebert will be replaced by Mary Cleary, a conservative lawyer active in Republican politics who has served as a local prosecutor in Culpeper County, Va., according to an email she sent staff members at the office on Saturday. Her email did not mention her predecessor or his predicament, saying only that “the Eastern District of Virginia has a distinguished legacy upon which we will build.”
It was unusual enough when Mr. Trump, at the start of his term, placed a team of his own personal lawyers, including Mr. Blanche, in key positions at the Justice Department.
It was even more unusual, however, that the president ignored the advice of those officials in favor of others who have limited or no experience at all in handling criminal cases: Ed Martin, the self-described captain of the Justice Department’s weaponization working group, which was created to go after Mr. Trump’s enemies, and William J. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Mr. Pulte had been pushing Mr. Trump for weeks to get rid of Mr. Siebert and was joined by Mr. Martin in delivering a message intended to prompt a dismissal, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Siebert, the two men told the president, had for some time been blocking efforts to subject Ms. James to the punishment he desired.
That message gained new urgency this week after Mr. Siebert encountered a significant hurdle in his separate investigation of Mr. Comey for allegedly lying in testimony to Congress. That inquiry — said to be based on testimony that Mr. Comey gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 — was under additional pressure because it was set to bump up against the statute of limitations within 10 days.
Chris Christie, the erstwhile Trump ally and former governor who once served as U.S. attorney in New Jersey, said that decisions about criminal prosecutions should be made by people with the requisite résumé and training, not by those like Mr. Pulte, Mr. Martin or Mr. Trump, for that matter.
“When the decisions are made by someone who has neither the education nor the experience to make those decisions, people immediately jump to the conclusion that they’re being made for reasons that have nothing to do with the law,” Mr. Christie said in a brief interview. “And that’s the type of slippery slope that we cannot have our criminal justice system go down.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment. A White House spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Since returning to office, Mr. Trump and his allies have often sought to justify their attacks on U.S. attorneys by claiming that the justice system under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been weaponized against his predecessor.
Still, there is no evidence that federal law enforcement officials in the Biden administration were strong-armed into bringing or dropping prosecutions for what were overtly political reasons. Nor were there any high-profile resignations by U.S. attorneys under Mr. Biden that were similar to Mr. Siebert’s resignation on Friday.
During his first term, Mr. Trump occasionally inserted himself into the affairs of U.S. attorney’s offices, but was often held back from doing so by his allies and advisers. In one high-profile episode, he fired Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, whose office handled case after case that rankled him, including those against two of his personal lawyers.
With his return to power, Mr. Trump has been less bounded in his handling of U.S. attorneys, and his top political appointees quickly moved to step into high-profile legal matters.
In an early example, top Justice Department officials ordered the dismissal of a federal bribery case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, overruling local prosecutors in Manhattan and prompting the resignation of the U.S. attorney there. Ms. Bondi personally intervened in a different case in Utah in July, ordering local prosecutors to drop the charges against a doctor accused of selling fake Covid vaccination cards.
Administration officials have also used a series of arcane legal maneuvers in an effort to have Mr. Trump’s nominees run federal prosecutors’ offices in New Jersey and Delaware after their temporary terms ran out, and despite federal judges in those districts using their lawful powers to oppose the candidates.
A federal judge in New Jersey found that those maneuvers were unconstitutional and that Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, had been in her position there unlawfully since July.
Moreover, a handful of top federal prosecutors handling sensitive cases have resigned in recent months under curious circumstances.
In August, Todd Gilbert, the former U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, left his post one month after taking the job as prosecutors under him conducted a related investigation into Mr. Comey. And in May, Ben Schrader, a top prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, quit just before the office filed charges against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March and then returned to U.S. soil to face indictment.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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