Trump Fires U.S. Attorney for Adhering to Proper Evidentiary Standards and Refusing to Persecute the President's Political Enemies

Sep 19, 2025

Donald Trump has promised to punish his political enemies by prosecuting them for a whole array of imagined crimes. But most professional prosecutors at the Department of Justice still have standards. One of them refused to bring bogus cases against two Trump targets—so Trump fired him.

The New York Times reports:

The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.
Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, 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 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.

See an overview of how the politically motivated case against Letitia James fell apart when the investigation turned up evidence that exonerates her. But to move these malicious prosecutions forward, Trump has pushed out a professional U.S. attorney and replaced him with an eager but inexperienced lackey.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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