President Donald Trump's administration launched a wide-ranging round of cuts at the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, according to three sources familiar with the matter and a document seen by Reuters, as a group representing FBI agents issued a rare warning of the potential for hundreds of firings.
It is the Trump administration's latest move to remake the U.S. criminal justice system after it directed the department to end all civil rights and environment litigation and to consider criminal investigations of state and local officials who interfere with his hardline immigration initiatives.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove on Thursday told the top federal prosecutors in each state to compile a list of all prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the investigation of the attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which was the largest Justice Department investigation in modern U.S. history.
"If true, these outrageous actions by acting officials are fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI agents," said the FBI Agents Association, a membership group of more than 14,000 active and former FBI agents.
"Dismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the bureau's ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the bureau and its new leadership for failure," the association added.
The staff cuts are hitting career FBI officials in nonpartisan roles who typically remain in their posts from administration to administration. The bureau has a history of political independence and is responsible for highly sensitive investigations involving counterterrorism, public corruption and cybersecurity.
At least five top FBI officials in major U.S. cities - Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, New Orleans and Las Vegas - were ordered to resign or be fired, one of the sources said. Another source said that a sixth senior FBI official, in Los Angeles, was given a similar order.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
FBI and Justice Department officials declined to comment on the various moves.
Kash Patel, Trump's nominee to lead the FBI, told a U.S. Senate panel on Thursday that he would protect the bureau's 37,000 employees against "political retribution" if he were confirmed.
The same day, the Justice Department said it was investigating the release by an upstate New York sheriff's office of an immigrant living in the U.S. illegally. This appears to be its first use of a new policy to criminally investigate state and local officials who do not comply with Trump's directives.
Bove, in a memo seen by Reuters, ordered the firings of all probationary prosecutors who had worked on Jan. 6-related cases, noting that Trump characterized their work as "a grave national injustice." It was not immediately clear how many people were affected.
In his first day back in the White House on Jan. 20, Trump granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged with storming the Capitol in a failed bid to block Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
"At a time when we are facing a multitude of threats to the homeland ... it is deeply alarming that the Trump administration appears to be purging dozens of the most experienced agents who are our nation's first line of defense," Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, said in a statement.
