The United States Department of Justice dismissed more than a dozen officials who worked on investigations that former special lawyer Jack Smith led to Donald Trump’s actions after the electoral loss of President 2020.
The interim attorney general James Mchenry eliminated the officials because he did not believe that these staff members could be trusted to implement the president’s agenda due to his roles in the investigations, said a spokesman for the department in a statement.
Smith conducted two investigations on Trump’s actions, which resulted in accusations. One case alleged that Trump illegally tried to revoke the presidential elections of 2020. The other claimed that Trump handled the qualified documents and obstructed justice after leaving the White House in 2021.
Trump and his allies criticized Smith’s investigations, often describing them and other actions that they did not like as examples of how the old Biden administration “armed” the government against conservatives.
One of the first executive orders Trump issued after taking office last week was to eliminate the people he perceived as political enemies.
It was not clear immediately which Smith team officials had been fired.
Smith withdrew both cases against Trump after being re -elected president, citing a policy of the Department of Justice that prohibits the prosecution of acting presidents.
The shots are added to the officials who were notified last week who are being reallocated to work in Trump’s main priorities, especially the application of immigration, according to a person who asked to remain anonymous to talk about personnel matters.
Fox News previously reported the shots.
Meanwhile, the United States interim prosecutor for the Columbia district, Ed Martin, launched an internal review of the use of certain positions of serious crime obstruction in the prosecutions of people who participated in the attack of January 6, 2021 in The United States Capitol, according to a person familiar with that movement.
Martin was a vocal critic of the prosecutions of January 6 and a defender of the defendants before being appointed to direct the DC office that had supervised that effort in the last four years. Trump signed a mass clemency order for the more than 1,500 people accused in the Capitol attack on their first day in office, forgiving almost all those who were convicted and ordering dismissed pending cases.
A spokesman for the United States prosecutor’s office did not immediately return a request for comments. Martin’s announcement was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
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