Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, hung an online help wanted sign for federal prosecutors last weekend that perhaps explained why so many valuable Justice Department staff members have left, and why so few candidates want in.
Assistant U.S. attorneys are not typically recruited, as Mr. Mizelle sought to do, by a former federal employee who asks potential candidates to send a private message to his X account. Nor have they been asked in the past to prove political or ideological fealty.
“If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me,” wrote Mr. Mizelle, a fierce Trump supporter who remains close with Justice Department leaders and senior officials in the West Wing.
Mr. Mizelle was acting as a private citizen expressing his own views. But the post reflected the prevailing sentiment inside the department — that Mr. Trump has the right to hire only those willing to execute his agenda. It also highlighted the dynamic that appears to be contributing to the very staffing shortages Mr. Mizelle tried to address.
The intermingling of law enforcement and political goals has made the department, long a magnet for platinum legal talent, an unappealing landing spot, according to current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The number of applications is down significantly from previous years, officials said, even as Trump loyalists have publicized vacancies through official and unconventional channels. Some of those applying are generally not as qualified as those who sought the position in the recent past, they added.
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
The White House has exercised extraordinary control over the Justice Department, with prosecutors pressured to investigate and prosecute the president’s enemies, all in the name of reversing purported politicization under Democrats.
Applications for vacant slots in U.S. attorneys’ offices, once apolitical questionnaires, now often include requirements to weigh in on Mr. Trump’s policies.
“How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role?” read one of the queries on an application for a job in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, whose ranks have drastically thinned after the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis spawned an exodus of prosecutors.
“Identify one or two relevant executive orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired,” reads another.
One former prosecutor who served on a hiring committee in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said that candidates who expressed support for administration policies were often moved forward for final interviews, even those with weak academic records and little litigation experience.
Yet at Mr. Trump’s Justice Department, the choosers are also beggars.
Several federal prosecutors’ offices around the country have suffered debilitating losses from firings and resignations — many stemming from efforts by senior department leaders to push career prosecutors into doing Mr. Trump’s bidding.
The department’s work force declined by 8 percent between November 2024 and November 2025, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management.
U.S. attorneys’ offices, the front lines responsible for executing Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to crush crime, lost 14 percent of their head count, dropping from 11,863 to 10,154. That was a staggering one-year reduction unlike anything the department has seen in recent memory, former officials said.
Worse still, the departures have hit the upper tier of prosecutors in premier offices the hardest, simply because those with the most experience were the most likely to have lucrative job prospects on the outside.
The crisis has been most acute in offices targeted by the tornadic disruption of White House directives that run counter to prosecutors’ ethics and training.
The problems started a month after Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, when the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, left her post, along with several colleagues. The resignations were a public rebuke after Justice Department leaders sought to strong-arm them into dismissing the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.
That same month, Denise Cheung, the chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, quit in protest rather than take part in what she believed to be an improper investigation of a contractor working for the Environmental Protection Agency. It was the first of many resignations in the office.
Mr. Trump’s desire for revenge has caused particular destruction in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, where he installed Lindsey Halligan, one of his own former defense lawyers, to prosecute two of his most prominent adversaries: Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.
The cases led to the firing or resignation of Ms. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert; several members of Mr. Siebert’s staff; and even Robert McBride, the veteran prosecutor hired to serve as Ms. Halligan’s chief deputy.
Few offices have been hit quite as hard as the one in Minneapolis, where career prosecutors are bailing out rather than execute the White House’s maximalist demands to prosecute protesters and Democrats.
But some of the most profound damage came from the department’s decision not to investigate the fatal shootings last month of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents, according to current and former officials.
About a dozen prosecutors have quit in recent weeks after top department officials intervened in their investigations — and as civil division lawyers buckle under a barrage of emergency petitions filed by newly detained immigrants seeking to be released from custody, people familiar with the matter said.
That prompted one attorney on loan from the Department of Homeland Security to tell a judge in open court this week: “The system sucks. This job sucks.”
She was quickly plucked from her post. But her sentiment simply reflected the reality of the situation, and has been openly acknowledged by Trump appointees, albeit in less colorful language.
“The sheer number of cases, especially in light of the substantial increase in this month alone, is imposing a crushing burden on U.S. attorneys’ offices,” Daniel Rosen, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Minnesota, admitted in a court filing in which he lamented the diversion of his staff from other criminal and civil cases.
The office has brought in several lawyers from the military, a stopgap measure used by other districts that have found themselves in a similar bind.
Mr. Rosen has privately pleaded for support from Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, after prosecutors in the office’s criminal division confronted him over the shooting investigations, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Mr. Blanche’s team responded by reaching out to nearby U.S. attorneys’ offices, including the one in Detroit, for help.
In a sign of the desperation to surge resources to Minnesota and other high-intensity districts, Francey Hakes, a senior aide to Mr. Blanche, sent a memo to all U.S. attorneys’ offices and major divisions of the Justice Department to produce a list of experienced prosecutors to join “emergency jump teams” that would be directed into overloaded offices.
The memo, obtained by The New York Times, orders U.S. attorneys in major jurisdictions to designate two prosecutors, preferably with experience in domestic terrorism cases, for the teams. Small offices are required to provide one.
The vast majority of those who left the department over the past year quit or retired to avoid being caught up in the chaos, for fear they would be targeted or asked to do things they believed to be improper, or contrary to their beliefs.
At the U.S. attorney’s office in the Central District of California, a steady stream of prosecutors have left since the arrival of Bill Essayli, an outspoken Trump ally installed as interim U.S. attorney last April.
Farewell parties were common, with departing prosecutors traditionally receiving a Justice Department seal signed by their colleagues as a parting gift. In recent months, tables of those seals have been laid out regularly in the office, a reflection of the large numbers of people leaving, former prosecutors said.
One former prosecutor recalled a conversation with Mr. Essayli in which he shared the trouble he was having finding qualified candidates for prosecutorial roles in the office.
Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, pushed back against the idea that the level of turnover was unusual. “We have hired and will continue to hire qualified attorneys and staff who will work hard to accomplish our mission of protecting our communities and promoting public safety,” he said.
Hours after Mr. Mizelle posted his plea last weekend, senior Justice Department officials amplified it, including those from offices that have become focal points in the effort to pursue Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution and grievance.
For his part, Mr. Mizelle was unapologetic about his post, which attracted a tsunami of negative responses online.
“The president is entitled to prosecutors who will actually pursue his agenda,” he said in a brief interview.
The sense of urgency he expressed has spread to other districts.
Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida who is overseeing an investigation into a fantastical “grand conspiracy,” possibly led by former President Barack Obama, to destroy Mr. Trump, recently made his own public appeal.
“We are hiring!” he wrote in an X post calling for applicants in his criminal, civil, national security, asset forfeiture and appellate sections.
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.
The post Demanding Support for Trump, Justice Dept. Struggles to Recruit Prosecutors appeared first on New York Times.
