President Trump said on Friday that he wanted to see the ouster of a U.S. attorney whose investigations of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey have not resulted in charges.
Hours later, the U.S. attorney, Erik S. Siebert of the Eastern District of Virginia, informed prosecutors in his office that he had resigned.
Mr. Siebert had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him.
The president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, initially said he was not following the matter closely. But he instantly belied that comment, saying he wanted Mr. Siebert removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination to the Senate.
“When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,” Mr. Trump said. The president did not mention that he nominated Mr. Siebert only after the two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, had already written Mr. Trump praising him.
When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”
Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”
Mr. Trump’s comments came after a high-stakes internal debate raged on Friday over the fate of Mr. Siebert — with Mr. Trump’s own appointees at the Justice Department and key Republicans on Capitol Hill arguing to retain the veteran prosecutor.
The episode was consistent with Mr. Trump’s threats to pursue the law enforcement officials who investigated him, an apparent challenge to the fundamental principle enshrined in the Justice Department’s rulebook of investigating crimes rather than targeting out-of-favor individuals to uncover potential wrongdoing.
And though Mr. Trump provided a rationale for Mr. Siebert’s ouster unrelated to the cases against Ms. James and Mr. Comey, the removal of a U.S. attorney who was investigating the president’s foes showed how deeply the administration has departed from the longstanding norm of avoiding political interference in prosecutions in favor of using the justice system to seek retribution.
A lawyer for Ms. James, Abbe D. Lowell, called Mr. Siebert’s removal “a brazen attack on the rule of law.”
“The prosecutor did exactly what justice required by following the facts and the evidence, which didn’t support charges against Attorney General James,” he said. “Firing people until he finds someone who will bend the law to carry out his revenge has been President Trump’s pattern — and it’s illegal.”
A spokesman for Mr. Siebert did not comment.
The ouster came after what appeared to be a last-ditch battle on Friday by some in the Justice Department to protect Mr. Siebert. Several administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters, described an unsettled and confusing situation for much of the day, with Mr. Siebert and his top deputy still at their desks working.
It was not clear, even after Mr. Trump’s comments, that they had been officially removed — or if they were to be fired outright or offered other assignments in the Justice Department.
Mr. Siebert told a group of prosecutors on Friday afternoon that he was considering resigning, and that Maya D. Song, the first assistant U.S. attorney in the office responsible for its operations, had been demoted to a job as a line prosecutor, according to two people familiar with the comments.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department, had privately defended Mr. Siebert against officials, including William J. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who had urged that he be fired and replaced with a prosecutor who would push the cases forward, according to a senior law enforcement official.
Mr. Pulte’s power far outstrips his role as the head of an obscure housing agency. He has gained Mr. Trump’s favor by pushing mortgage fraud allegations against perceived adversaries of the White House, including Ms. James; a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook; and Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.
Mr. Pulte has made use of his influence and access to a president who prefers advisers who are willing to push boundaries. He had told Mr. Trump directly that he believed Mr. Siebert could be doing more, according to several officials with knowledge of the matter.
But Mr. Blanche, like Mr. Siebert, questioned the legal viability of bringing charges against Ms. James, according to current and former department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about internal discussions.
Mr. Siebert’s office also recently hit a roadblock in its investigation of Mr. Comey on claims that he lied under oath.
Last week, prosecutors from Mr. Siebert’s office subpoenaed Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia law professor and close friend and adviser to Mr. Comey, in connection with an investigation into whether the former director had lied about whether he authorized Mr. Richman to leak information to the news media, according to people familiar with the situation. Documents released by the F.B.I. in August showed that investigators had examined possible disclosures of classified information to The New York Times.
Mr. Richman’s statements to prosecutors were not helpful in their efforts to build a case against Mr. Comey, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The push to remove Mr. Siebert, a highly regarded career prosecutor who worked closely with Emil Bove III, Mr. Trump’s former enforcer in the department on immigration and gang cases, came as a shock in an office that handles some of the nation’s most sensitive national security investigations. His possible termination was reported earlier by ABC News.
Mr. Siebert is well liked by many Trump administration officials and key congressional leaders, including Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The threat against Mr. Siebert was perhaps the most glaring example yet of the Trump administration’s efforts to exercise direct control over personnel and policy decisions at U.S. attorney’s offices around the country. Those moves have badly eroded the traditional distance between the White House and the Justice Department.
Administration officials have already used a series of arcane legal maneuvers in an effort to have Mr. Trump’s nominees run federal prosecutors’ offices in states including New Jersey and Delaware after their temporary terms ran out and despite the fact that federal judges in those districts have used their lawful powers to oppose the candidates.
A federal judge has found that those maneuvers are unconstitutional and that Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, has been in her position unlawfully since July.
Top political appointees in Mr. Trump’s Justice Department have also stepped in to order the dismissal of high-profile matters like the bribery case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, overruling local prosecutors. Ms. Bondi personally intervened in a case in Utah in July, ordering local prosecutors to drop the charges against a doctor accused of selling fake Covid vaccination cards.
Ms. James has been under threat since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. In the spring, his allies discovered a document related to a house in Virginia she bought with her niece, and believed they had struck gold.
On the document, she had said that she planned to live in the house as a primary residence, an assertion flatly contradicted by other documents associated with the house. Mr. Pulte soon sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department highlighting that document along with other perceived misstatements related to Ms. James’s housing records, and accused her of having committed mortgage fraud.
But Ms. James’s exchanges with the lender showed her having communicated clearly that she did not plan to live in the house, and there was no indication that the single document on which she said otherwise was taken into account during the transaction. Her niece, her accountant and others involved in the transaction testified before a grand jury over the summer, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Mr. Siebert, a former Washington, D.C., police officer, worked his way up through the ranks at the U.S. attorney’s office over the past 15 years. He has handled a broad range of cases including international drug and firearms trafficking, white-collar crime, child sexual exploitation, public corruption and immigration.
He has been particularly active on immigrant gang cases during the Trump administration and often spoke about his solid working relationship with Mr. Bove, who while at the department oversaw a wave of firings and forced retirements, according to officials.
Beginning in 2019, he was the deputy criminal supervisor in the Richmond division of the U.S. attorney’s office. He became the interim U.S. attorney of Eastern Virginia in January, and in May the federal judges in the district unanimously chose to keep him in the role.
Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
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.
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
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