In its campaign of “uprooting the foot soldiers,” the Trump Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen Jan. 6 prosecutors, even as those they sent to prison walk free. Share full article 416
Michael Gordon, left, was dismissed as a federal prosecutor after he investigated the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, right.
By Dan Barry and Alan Feuer
Dan Barry reported from Tampa, Fla., and Alan Feuer from Washington. Both have written extensively about the Jan. 6 riot and its aftermath.
Aug. 24, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
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The lawyer took the elevator 32 floors to the U.S. attorney’s office, where for eight years he had worked as a highly regarded prosecutor. He had a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies to share and some thoughts to keep to himself.
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“You have to be polite,” the lawyer, Michael Gordon, explained as the elevator rose. “But I don’t want to minimize it, or make it seem like everything’s OK. It’s not.”
Mr. Gordon was heading up on this steaming late July day in Tampa, Fla., to collect his things and say goodbye. Three weeks earlier, and just two days after receiving yet another outstanding performance review, he had been interviewing a witness online when a grim-faced colleague interrupted to hand him a letter. It said he was being “removed from federal service effective immediately” — as in, now.
Although the brief letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, provided no justification, Mr. Gordon knew the likely reason: Jan. 6, 2021.
He was being fired for successfully prosecuting people who had stormed the United States Capitol that day — assaulting police officers, vandalizing a national landmark and disrupting that sacrosanct moment in a democracy, the transfer of presidential power.
He was being fired for doing his job.
The letter did more than inform Mr. Gordon, a 47-year-old father of two, that he was unemployed. It confirmed for him his view that the Justice Department he had been honored to work for was now helping to whitewash a traumatic event in American history, supporting President Trump’s reframing of its violence as patriotic — and those who had prosecuted rioters in the name of justice as villains, perhaps even traitors.
In the seven months since Mr. Trump, newly returned to the White House, granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged in the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history, his administration has turned the agency upside down.
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