Department of Justice Under Trump: Cases, Firings, and the FBI

The Department of Justice under Trump’s second term has been reshaped into an instrument for prosecuting the president’s political adversaries, dropping cases against his allies, purging career staff who resist, and defying court orders, while the internal and external structures that once policed prosecutorial misconduct have been weakened or removed. The transformation began in the first weeks after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s confirmation in February 2025 and accelerated after her firing in April 2026, when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche took over as Acting Attorney General. Former officials from both parties, hundreds of ex-department lawyers, and federal judges in multiple cases have said the department can no longer be presumed to act in good faith.

Who Runs the Department Now

Pam Bondi was confirmed as Attorney General on February 4, 2025, by a 54–46 Senate vote, with Senator John Fetterman the only Democrat joining every Republican.¹ At her confirmation, she promised that every case would be “prosecuted based on the facts and the law” and that she would “restore confidence and integrity” to the department.² Democrats on the Judiciary Committee had cited her prior work as one of Trump’s personal attorneys and 2023 remarks in which she said prosecutors who investigated Trump would themselves be prosecuted.

Bondi was fired on April 2, 2026. Todd Blanche, confirmed as Deputy Attorney General a month after Bondi took office, became Acting Attorney General. Both Blanche and Emil Bove, another senior DOJ official, had served as Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyers before joining the administration.³ Kash Patel was sworn in as FBI Director on February 20, 2025.⁴ Harmeet Dhillon was confirmed to lead the Civil Rights Division on April 3, 2025.

One of Bondi’s first acts was to establish a “weaponization working group” to review federal enforcement over the previous four years, looking for cases where conduct “appears to have been designed to achieve political objectives or other improper aims.” The stated targets included former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work, the Mar-a-Lago search, and prosecutions arising from the January 6 Capitol attack.⁵

Criminal Cases Against Trump’s Adversaries

The department has brought criminal charges against a series of people Trump has publicly identified as enemies. Protect Democracy’s tracker counts dozens of political opponents targeted with criminal charges, with most cases failing in court.⁶

James Comey

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted in September 2025 on charges of making false statements and obstruction. Senior District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissed the case, ruling that the appointment of prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was invalid. The DOJ indicted Comey a second time in April 2026 over an Instagram post in which seashells were arranged to read “86 47,” which prosecutors alleged constituted a threat against the president.⁷

Letitia James

New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted in October 2025 on bank fraud and false statement charges tied to a property purchase. Judge Currie dismissed that case on the same grounds as Comey’s. Before charges were filed, career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia had determined there was no probable cause, and the local U.S. Attorney, Erik Siebert, resigned rather than pursue the case.⁶

John Bolton and Others

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton was indicted in October 2025 for alleged unlawful retention and transmission of classified documents.⁷ The DOJ opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in January 2026 concerning his testimony about building renovations. Senator Adam Schiff was placed under investigation for alleged insurance fraud. In February 2026, the department sought but failed to secure indictments against six Democratic members of Congress over a video about military service members refusing illegal orders. The prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a migrant who had been unlawfully deported, was dismissed in May 2026 on grounds of “vindictive and selective prosecution.”⁶

In an October 2025 survey of 50 former senior federal legal officials, split between Democratic and Republican appointees, every participant agreed that Trump was using the Justice Department as “a tool of retribution and reward.” The American Bar Association issued a statement that month calling the use of federal prosecutorial power for “apparent partisan ends” an “affront to the rule of law.”⁸

Cases Dropped for Trump’s Allies

The mirror image of the retaliatory prosecutions is a set of cases against allies that the department has ended.

The Public Integrity Section’s investigation into border czar Tom Homan was shut down after Trump took office. In September 2024, undercover FBI agents had recorded Homan accepting a bag containing $50,000 in cash from individuals posing as businessmen seeking future government border security contracts. Officials closing the probe cited doubts about proving Homan agreed to specific acts in exchange for the money and noted he did not hold an official government position at the time. Some officials argued the case was ended prematurely.⁹

The department moved to dismiss the prosecution of former Representative Jeff Fortenberry, dropped its investigation into Representative Andy Ogles, and contested charges against co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.¹⁰ Both federal criminal cases against Trump himself, the January 6 election interference case and the classified documents case, were dismissed in November 2024 following his election victory; Special Counsel Jack Smith cited the Office of Legal Counsel policy against prosecuting a sitting president and said the outcome was “not based on the merits or strength of the case.”¹¹

Broader enforcement categories were also cut back. The DOJ shut down more than 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases and declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, including over 200 related to espionage and classified information. Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unregistered foreign agent cases unless the conduct involved “traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”¹²

The Eric Adams Dismissal

The clearest documented episode of political direction over a prosecution was the New York City mayor’s case. Eric Adams had been indicted on five counts, including bribery and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. On February 10, 2025, Emil Bove directed Acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon to drop the case. Bove’s memo said the pending trial was “impeding the mayor’s support for Trump’s immigration agenda” and “hampering the mayor’s reelection campaign,” and explicitly stated the department had reached that conclusion “without assessing the strength of the evidence.”¹³

Sassoon refused. In her resignation letter she alleged the dismissal was a reward for “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance,” citing a January 31 meeting in which Adams’s attorneys urged what she described as a quid pro quo — cooperation with federal immigration priorities in exchange for the indictment being dropped. Adams’s attorney denied any exchange. Sassoon, Kevin Driscoll, acting head of the DOJ Criminal Division, and John Keller, a top official in the Public Integrity Section, all resigned in protest.¹³ The presiding judge dismissed the case with prejudice, writing that the department’s handling “smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”¹⁰

Firings, Resignations, and Gutted Divisions

Roughly 6,400 employees left the department in 2025, according to Justice Connection, a group of former staff. More than 230 lawyers, agents, and other employees were fired outright, while thousands more departed voluntarily. The department has said it hired more than 3,400 career attorneys since Trump took office.¹⁴

At least 35 employees who had worked for Jack Smith were fired, along with three senior January 6 prosecutors in June 2025 and more than 20 additional employees the following month. The weaponization working group oversaw the firings, and the department defended them as “consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”¹⁵

Two units were hollowed out. The Civil Rights Division lost more than 75 percent of its attorneys by mid-2025; more than 250 attorneys, roughly 70 percent of its January 2025 workforce, resigned, accepted deferred resignations, or were reassigned, and the section responsible for enforcing nondiscrimination by federal fund recipients was left with no attorneys at all.¹⁶ The Public Integrity Section, which investigates corruption by public officials, went from 36 career lawyers to two.¹⁷ Nearly 300 former DOJ employees signed an open letter saying the department was “taking a sledgehammer” to the rule of law.¹²

Under Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division rewrote its voting section’s mission to focus on “voting fraud” and “illegal voting” rather than voting discrimination. The department dropped a Texas vote-dilution case, a lawsuit against Georgia’s voter suppression law, and challenges to voter purges in Alabama and Virginia. In May 2025, it moved to dismiss police reform consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville, agreements born from investigations into the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Dhillon argued the Biden administration had relied on “faulty legal theories” and “cherry-picked” statistics.¹⁸ In December 2025, the department repealed “disparate impact” guidance, effectively requiring that discrimination claims be “based solely on proof of actual, intentional bias, not just on unequal outcomes.”¹⁹

The Firing of Erez Reuveni

Erez Reuveni had been a career DOJ attorney for nearly 15 years. On April 4, 2025, at a hearing before Judge Paula Xinis in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a migrant who had been deported to a high-security prison in El Salvador, Reuveni told the court the deportation had been a mistake and there was no legal justification for it. Blanche placed him on leave the next day for “failure to follow instructions from superiors,” and he was terminated on April 11. Bondi said publicly that Reuveni “did not zealously advocate for his client.”²⁰

Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint, filed with lawmakers and the DOJ inspector general in June 2025, alleged a broader pattern. He reported that Emil Bove told subordinates on March 14, 2025, that it might be necessary to tell a court “fuck you” and ignore its orders. The complaint described department leadership directing attorneys to misrepresent facts and withhold information from courts to advance deportation policies, putting career lawyers in what he called a “Hobbesian choice” between their jobs and their duty to be truthful before a tribunal.²¹ The Supreme Court subsequently issued a unanimous ruling finding the government had failed to justify the deportation and failed to assist in Abrego Garcia’s return.²⁰

How the Courts Are Responding

Federal judges have increasingly refused to grant the department the “presumption of regularity” — the longstanding assumption that the government follows standard procedures and tells the truth. In the Abrego Garcia litigation, a court told DOJ attorneys, “You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it in my view,” citing the government’s “willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.” In another case, a court stated that the government’s defense was “so disingenuous that the Court is left with little confidence that the defense can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.”¹⁰

As of June 2026, the Just Security litigation tracker reported 803 active legal challenges to Trump administration executive actions, with plaintiffs winning 262 and the government prevailing in 126.²²

Oversight Machinery Dismantled

The internal accountability structures that once policed department lawyers have been systematically weakened. Shortly after inauguration, political appointees removed the head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, who had served for 38 years. As of late 2025, no replacement had been named. The career official responsible for high-level ethics determinations, a 34-year veteran, was removed and replaced by political appointees, including a recent law school graduate and a former personal defense attorney for the president. The head of the Departmental Ethics Office was also fired.¹⁷

At the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals from fired or disciplined federal employees, the chair was fired and the vice chair demoted. The board lost its quorum for months even as it faced a record 11,166 appeals by May 2025.¹⁷

External oversight has also been targeted. In March 2026, the DOJ proposed a rule asserting that the attorney general has the right to review state bar complaints against current or former department attorneys before any state bar investigation proceeds. Under the proposal, the department would prohibit its employees from providing nonpublic information to state bar investigators during the review period, with no timeline for completion. Blanche publicly threatened to take “activist bars … out of the picture” and handle all misconduct allegations internally.²³

The original head of the weaponization working group, Ed Martin, who was also interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sought to open a criminal investigation into Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over 2020 comments, though career lawyers blocked the effort. He sent threatening letters on DOJ letterhead to Georgetown University Law School over its diversity programs, conducted a photoshoot outside Letitia James’s home while she was under investigation, and threatened to investigate a former FBI agent who responded to the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting after meeting with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The D.C. Disciplinary Counsel filed formal misconduct charges against Martin over the Georgetown letters. His nomination as U.S. Attorney was withdrawn in May 2025 after Republican senators raised concerns, and he was moved to U.S. pardon attorney before being removed from the working group by early 2026.²⁴

The FBI Under Kash Patel

Patel reshaped the bureau’s structure and priorities. He fired dozens of agents and reassigned approximately one-quarter of the FBI’s 13,000 agents to target undocumented immigrants or conduct street patrols in cities. The public corruption unit in the Washington Field Office, which had previously investigated political figures including Trump, was disbanded. College degrees were dropped as a requirement for new agents, and FBI academy training was cut from 18 weeks to eight.²⁵

Patel initiated what has been called “the grand conspiracy case,” an investigation seeking to link the various people Trump blames for the investigations that targeted him, from the 2016 Russia probe through the 2024 criminal prosecutions. Patel claimed to have discovered classified documents in government “burn bags” in a room at FBI headquarters that he said proved the existence of a “deep state” conspiracy. Career investigators who reviewed the documents concluded they were “nothing like a smoking gun.”²⁶ When Todd Gilbert, the interim U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Virginia, concluded there was insufficient factual basis for the case and produced a declination memo, he was fired after 37 days. His successor, Erik Siebert, also resisted the pressure and was fired in September 2025. The cases were handed to Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience, whose resulting indictments against Comey and James were dismissed by the federal judge who ruled her appointment unlawful.²⁷

Immigration, the Death Penalty, and the IRS Settlement

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” directing the attorney general to prioritize prosecution of offenses related to unauthorized entry. The order also created Homeland Security Task Forces in every state, jointly operated by the DOJ and DHS.²⁸ A January 22, 2025, memorandum delegated immigration enforcement authority to the U.S. Marshals Service, the DEA, the ATF, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and other DOJ employees. A sanctuary cities enforcement working group was established to track sanctuary policies and initiate lawsuits against noncompliant jurisdictions.²⁹

On January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the department to restore the federal death penalty, and Bondi formally lifted the moratorium on federal executions on February 5, 2025, ending a pause in place since July 2021. The directive instructed prosecutors to seek the death penalty for capital crimes committed by undocumented immigrants “absent significant mitigating circumstances,” as well as for the murder of law enforcement officers and drug-related offenses by cartels.³⁰ By April 2026, the department had authorized death sentences against 44 defendants. It reinstated the lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, directed the Bureau of Prisons to expand protocols to include the firing squad, and ordered an examination of options for constructing new execution facilities.³¹

Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns by a former contractor who had been sentenced to five years in prison in 2024. Blanche announced a settlement in which the government would be “forever barred” from auditing Trump family tax returns, and the department established a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate individuals claiming harm from federal government actions. Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami reopened the case on May 29, 2026, to investigate whether the settlement was “a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the court,” noting that the president was effectively on both sides of the dispute. A bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges had filed a motion urging the court to intervene. Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a separate temporary injunction blocking any disbursement from the fund.³²³³ The House Judiciary Committee voted 18–17 to reject a Democratic motion to subpoena Blanche and other officials over the fund.³⁴

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2
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3
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The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Civil Rights Organizations Call for Oversight of DOJ Civil Rights Division
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Brennan Center for Justice. The Department of Justice’s Broken Accountability System
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ABC News. Justice Department to Drop Police Reform Agreements in Louisville and Minneapolis
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LeadingAge. Trump Administration Axes Disparate Impact Civil Rights Protections
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Rep. Goodlander. Goodlander Demands Attorney General Bondi Reinstate DOJ Lawyer
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Brennan Center for Justice. The Justice Department Attempts to Shield Its Lawyers From Accountability for Misconduct
24
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26
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29
Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Federal Tracking of Executive Orders on Immigration Enforcement
30
U.S. Department of Justice. Attorney General Memorandum on Federal Death Penalty
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U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Department Takes Actions to Strengthen Federal Death Penalty
32
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The Guardian. Trump IRS Suit Reopened
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