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NBC News
25-07-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Former Jan. 6 prosecutor and ex-DOJ employees sue Trump administration over firings
WASHINGTON — It was late afternoon on the last Friday in June, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Gordon was in his office in Tampa, Florida, interviewing a victim for an upcoming trial via Zoom. Alongside a special agent, Gordon was preparing the victim to be a witness in a Justice Department case against a lawyer who the Justice Department alleged had been scamming clients. There was a knock at the door, Gordon later told NBC News, and he didn't answer; at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida, there was a culture of not just popping in when the door is closed. But the door popped open, and there stood the office manager, ashen-faced. The office manager is in charge of security, and Gordon thought for a moment that something might have happened to his family. Gordon muted the Zoom call, and the office manager handed him a piece of paper. It was a one-page letter signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi. He'd been terminated from federal service. "No explanation. No advance warning. No description of what the cause was," Gordon said in an interview. "Now, I knew why. I knew it had to be my Jan. 6 work." Gordon had been senior trial counsel in the Capitol Siege Section of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, which prosecuted alleged rioters involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. His title reflected some of the high-profile cases he'd taken on during the Jan. 6 investigation and the role he played in helping other federal prosecutors. At the time of his firing, Gordon had long been working on other cases back home in Florida. He had recently been assigned to co-lead a case against two people accused of stealing more than $100 million from a medical trust for people with disabilities, as well as injured workers and retirees. Just two days before he was fired, he'd received an "outstanding" rating on his performance review. Now, along with two other recently fired Justice Department employees, Gordon is pushing back, suing the Trump administration late Thursday over their dismissals. The suit argues that the normal procedures federal employees are expected to go through to address their grievances — the Merit Systems Protection Board — are fundamentally broken because of the Trump administration's actions. MSPB is a quasi-judicial body that is meant to settle disputes between employees and their agencies, but the suit argues it "cannot function as intended" because of President Donald Trump's firing of MSPB member Cathy Harris. A federal court issued a permanent injunction reinstating Harris, but the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, allowing Harris' removal. Now the MSPB lacks a quorum to vote on any petitions for review, while MSPB administrative judges are "overwhelmed" because of the government's termination of thousands of federal employees. Gordon filed the lawsuit alongside Patricia Hartman, who was a top spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, and Joseph Tirrell, who was director of the Departmental Ethics Office, before the Trump administration dismissed them this year. Tirrell, an FBI and Navy veteran, had 19 years of federal civil service, along with six years of military service, when he was fired. Hartman, who had worked for various Justice Department components for almost two decades, oversaw news releases and media responses related to the Jan. 6 prosecutions, which was the largest investigation in FBI history, involving more than 1,500 defendants. 'I was never given an explanation for my termination," Hartman told NBC News. "Based on my performance reviews, which have always been outstanding, I have to believe that something else was driving this. The bottom line is this, in my mind, amounts to psychological terrorism. You are removing people who were good or excellent at their jobs with no explanation.' The lawyers on the lawsuit are Abbe Lowell, Norm Eisen, Heidi Burakiewicz and Mark Zaid, a whistleblower attorney who has been targeted by the Trump administration, which stripped his security clearance after Trump named him in an executive order. Zaid has since sued. The new administration has fired roughly 200 Justice Department employees, according to Justice Connection, an organization that was set up to support Justice Department employees. "The way in which these employees have been terminated seems like a pretty clear violation of the Civil Service Protection Act and general constitutional due process protections, and it's been destabilizing for the workforce, because nobody knows when they're going to be next," said Stacy Young, a former Justice Department employee. 'I hear from employees all the time who tell me they wake up in the morning terrified that today will be their day. It feels to a lot of them like psychological warfare.' Gordon was fired the same day two other Jan. 6 prosecutors were fired last month. He'd started out as a state prosecutor in New York City and began his career as a federal prosecutor in January 2017, working in the violent crimes and narcotics section. When he saw what happened on Jan. 6 and the call go out within the Justice Department for assistance prosecuting those involved, he signed up, he told NBC News. Jason Manning, a former federal prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases, as well, said Gordon executed back-to-back trials "flawlessly" and played a critical role in supporting others in the unit. "On a large team of excellent and hard-working people, Mike really stood out as a leader on the team, as somebody who prosecuted some of the most notorious defendants and some of the most highly watched and high-pressure and critical cases," Manning said. Among them was the case against Ray Epps, who was the target of false conspiracy theories claiming he was a federal government plant, before he was eventually charged by federal prosecutors, who sought to send him to prison for six months. A judge ultimately sentenced Epps to probation, citing the impact the conspiracy theories had on his life. After Trump became the Republican presidential nominee last year, federal prosecutors working the Jan. 6 cases knew there was a risk to their work, and they made dark jokes about what could happen to them if Trump returned to office, multiple sources close to the Justice Department have told NBC News. Now, those fears have become a reality. When he returned to office, Trump quickly pardoned Jan. 6 defendants en masse, and probationary federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases were fired, as were people who worked on special counsel Jack Smith's investigation of Trump. Current FBI employees who worked on the Smith and Jan. 6 probes still wonder what could happen to them down the road after the Justice Department demanded a list of employees who worked on those investigations. "The people who volunteered for that detail are some of the best, smartest, most talented lawyers in the country," Gordon said, referring to Jan. 6 prosecutors. "It's not that somehow the administration should just pat itself on the back and say, 'Great, like, these are all deep state Democrats that we're driving out.' That's not what's happening. They are either firing or pushing out some of the most talented people they have."
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion: Why SCOTUS' Monstrous Egos are Handing Trump Undeserved Wins
The U.S. Supreme Court has continued its expansion of President Trump's powers and the use of its emergency docket in its recent ruling allowing him to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB)—an action that up until now was prohibited by precedent dating back 90 years. The Humphrey's Executor case is a foundational building block for the principle that the President isn't a ruler but rather heads one branch of a government—and in a system where any head of the executive branch is restricted from simply remaking the other branches to fit their own agenda, or chopping them off entirely. William Humphrey was a Federal Trade Commission member appointed by President Coolidge and then reappointed by President Hoover pursuant to the Federal Trade Commission Act which allowed his removal from that position only for 'inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.' Despite this, F.D.R., three months into office and desiring commissioners more sympathetic to his New Deal, asked Humphrey to resign. Humphrey refused to do so and F.D.R. fired him. Five months later, Humphrey died, but his executor litigated the case all the way to the Supreme Court seeking Humphrey's backpay. The high court ruled unanimously in favor of Humphrey, finding that F.D.R. had exceeded his Constitutional authority. Like the 1935 Supreme Court, two different federal trial courts found it quite plain that President Trump lacked the power to remove Gwynne Wilcox from the NLRB and Cathy Harris from the MSPB. Both ordered Trump to keep the officials in their respective jobs. But in a 6-3 decision, the current Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration. Troublingly, the Court did so despite recognizing 'the relevant statutes prohibit the president from removing these officers without cause' and that 'no qualifying cause was given.' Even more troubling is the fact that the case was resolved through the emergency docket process, by which full arguments and briefings are skipped and 'orders' rather than opinions are issued under the idea that the expedited process is necessitated by emergency. This decision continues the alarming trend from the conservative majority—respecting precedent only when it suits their ideology. Enhancing the power of the President under a unitary executive theory has been a long-game effort by legal conservatives, but the combination of that transactional judicial analysis with overuse of the emergency docket may not only put stare decisis on a path towards its deathbed but also the effectiveness the high court. The unprecedented increase in the use of the emergency docket similarly undermines the lower courts and the processes in place to check excesses by the executive branch. It also makes one question who is really making the call as to what cases merit emergency attention. As The Hill put it: 'Forget 911. When the Trump administration has an emergency, it just calls nine—justices, that is.' This willingness to take on all cases immediately may reflect a conceit that the justices (at least the conservative ones) increasingly don't hide: That the high court's ability to act fast negates the need for lower courts to issue nation-wide injunctions. This approach, if fully implemented, would make the Supreme Court not the court of last resort but the only court. In theory, the court's taking on these cases could be seen as perhaps a willingness to take on the task of reining in Trump's excesses. But thus far they seem avoidant of direct confrontation. The instructions to the Department of Justice in the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a brutal Venezuelan prison were not a forceful 'bring him back' but rather a wishy-washy directive to 'facilitate' his return. Fear of an outright refusal by Trump to obey rulings might motivate the court's hesitancy; they may calculate that piecemeal capitulations will postpone confrontation thus protecting their authority. But robust rulings set by lower courts cases allow the high court to use judicial restraint in its decisions. Without it, restraint becomes avoidant behavior that undermines the court's effectiveness while emboldening the Trump administration's overreach. Perhaps blinded by their own egos and sense of self-importance, the Roberts-led conservative majority seems to relish the conceit that only they have the legal chops to manage legal cases in the Trump era. But such hubris actually undercuts the judiciary's effectiveness and, up against a figure like Trump who will seek to convert every inch given him into a mile, it may be undercut to the point of irrelevance.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Biden-appointed judge thwarts Trump's attempt to clean house at consumer safety agency
A federal judge in Maryland on Friday ruled that President Donald Trump lacked the authority to fire three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and ordered their reinstatement — teeing up another high-stakes court clash centered on Trump's ability as commander-in-chief to remove or otherwise control the members of independent agencies. U.S. District Judge Matthew Maddox, a Biden appointee, sided with the three ousted members of the board — Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric and Richard Trumka Jr. — in ruling that their firings were unlawful and ordered all three members to be reinstated to their posts. In his ruling, Maddox said that the tenured design and protection of the five-member, staggered-term CPSC board does "not interfere with" Trump's executive branch powers under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Appeals Court Blocks Trump From Firing Federal Board Members, Tees Up Supreme Court Fight The decision is a near-term blow for Trump, and comes just weeks after the Supreme Court last month agreed to uphold, for now, Trump's removal of two Democratic appointees from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Merit Systems Protections Board (MSPB). Both board members had challenged their terminations as "unlawful" in separate lawsuits filed in D.C. federal court. The Supreme Court voted 6-3 in May to temporarily allow the firing of both board members, siding with lawyers for the Trump administration, who had urged the justices to keep both members on the job while the case continued to move through the lower courts. Read On The Fox News App In his ruling, Maddox sought to distinguish those cases from the terminations of members of the CPSC board and said that the Trump administration, in this case, had failed to identify neglect or malfeasance by any other Senate-confirmed commissioners on the CPSC, which is required by law to justify their removals. Judges V Trump: Here Are The Key Court Battles Halting The White House Agenda "For the reasons set forth below, the Court finds no constitutional defect in the statutory restriction on Plaintiffs' removal and that Plaintiffs' purported removal from office was unlawful," he said in the order. "The Court shall enter an Order granting Plaintiffs' motion, denying Defendants' motion, and providing declaratory and injunctive relief permitting Plaintiffs to resume their duties as CPSC Commissioners." The decision clears the way for the members to return to their roles on the board, pending an appeal to higher courts by the Trump administration. The case is the latest in a string of challenges centered on Trump's ability to remove members of independent boards. Like the NLRB and MSPB rulings, it centers on the 90-year-old Supreme Court decision known as Humphrey's Executor, in which the court unanimously ruled that presidents cannot fire independent board members without cause. Maddox invoked the uncertainty created by the preliminary posture of the NLRB and MSPB cases, which saw both plaintiffs removed and reinstated to their positions multiple times — which he said was the basis for ordering more permanent injunctive relief. "Disruption might have resulted in the instant case if Plaintiffs had been reinstated while this case was in its preliminary posture, only to have the Court later deny relief in its final judgment and subject Plaintiffs to removal again," said Maddox. "The risk of such disruption is no longer a factor now that the Court is granting permanent injunctive relief as a final judgment."Original article source: Biden-appointed judge thwarts Trump's attempt to clean house at consumer safety agency
Vox
04-06-2025
- Business
- Vox
A federal court's novel proposal to rein in Trump's power grab
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. Federal civil servants are supposed to enjoy robust protections against being fired or demoted for political reasons. But President Donald Trump has effectively stripped them of these protections by neutralizing the federal agencies that implement these safeguards. An agency known as the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) hears civil servants' claims that a 'government employer discriminated against them, retaliated against them for whistleblowing, violated protections for veterans, or otherwise subjected them to an unlawful adverse employment action or prohibited personnel practice,' as a federal appeals court explained in an opinion on Tuesday. But the three-member board currently lacks the quorum it needs to operate because Trump fired two of the members. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Trump also fired Hampton Dellinger, who until recently served as the special counsel of the United States, a role that investigates alleged violations of federal civil service protections and brings related cases to the MSPB. Trump recently nominated Paul Ingrassia, a far-right podcaster and recent law school graduate to replace Dellinger. The upshot of these firings is that no one in the government is able to enforce laws and regulations protecting civil servants. As Dellinger noted in an interview, the morning before a federal appeals court determined that Trump could fire him, he'd 'been able to get 6,000 newly hired federal employees back on the job,' and was working to get 'all probationary employees put back on the job [after] their unlawful firing' by the Department of Government Efficiency and other Trump administration efforts to cull the federal workforce. Related The Supreme Court just revealed one thing it actually fears about Trump These and other efforts to reinstate illegally fired federal workers are on hold, and may not resume until Trump leaves office. Which brings us to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit's decision in National Association of Immigration Judges v. Owen, which proposes an innovative solution to this problem. As the Owen opinion notes, the Supreme Court has held that the MSPB process is the only process a federal worker can use if they believe they've been fired in violation of federal civil service laws. So if that process is shut down, the worker is out of luck. But the Fourth Circuit's Owen opinion argues that this 'conclusion can only be true…when the statute functions as Congress intended.' That is, if the MSPB and the special counsel are unable to 'fulfill their roles prescribed by' federal law, then the courts should pick up the slack and start hearing cases brought by illegally fired civil servants. For procedural reasons, the Fourth Circuit's decision will not take effect right away — the court sent the case back down to a trial judge to 'conduct a factual inquiry' into whether the MSPB continues to function. And, even after that inquiry is complete, the Trump administration is likely to appeal the Fourth Circuit's decision to the Supreme Court if it wants to keep civil service protections on ice. If the justices agree with the circuit court, however, that will close a legal loophole that has left federal civil servants unprotected by laws that are still very much on the books. And it will cure a problem that the Supreme Court bears much of the blame for creating. The 'unitary executive,' or why the Supreme Court is to blame for the loss of civil service protections Federal law provides that Dellinger could 'be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,' and members of the MSPB enjoy similar protections against being fired. Trump's decision to fire these officials was illegal under these laws. But a federal appeals court nonetheless permitted Trump to fire Dellinger, and the Supreme Court recently backed Trump's decision to fire the MSPB members as well. The reason is a legal theory known as the 'unitary executive,' which is popular among Republican legal scholars, and especially among the six Republicans that control the Supreme Court. If you want to know all the details of this theory, I can point you to three different explainers I've written on the unitary executive. The short explanation is that the unitary executive theory claims that the president must have the power to fire top political appointees charged with executing federal laws – including officials who execute laws protecting civil servants from illegal firings. Related The legal theory that would make Trump the most powerful president in US history But the Supreme Court has never claimed that the unitary executive permits the president to fire any federal worker regardless of whether Congress has protected them or not. In a seminal opinion laying out the unitary executive theory, for example, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the president must have the power to remove 'principal officers' — high-ranking officials like Dellinger who must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Under Scalia's approach, lower-ranking government workers may still be given some protection. The Fourth Circuit cannot override the Supreme Court's decision to embrace the unitary executive theory. But the Owen opinion essentially tries to police the line drawn by Scalia. The Supreme Court has given Trump the power to fire some high-ranking officials, but he shouldn't be able to use that power as a back door to eliminate job protections for all civil servants. The Fourth Circuit suggests that the federal law which simultaneously gave the MSPB exclusive authority over civil service disputes, while also protecting MSPB members from being fired for political reasons, must be read as a package. Congress, this argument goes, would not have agreed to shunt all civil service disputes to the MSPB if it had known that the Supreme Court would strip the MSPB of its independence. And so, if the MSPB loses its independence, it must also lose its exclusive authority over civil service disputes — and federal courts must regain the power to hear those cases. It remains to be seen whether this argument persuades a Republican Supreme Court — all three of the Fourth Circuit judges who decided the Owen case are Democrats, and two are Biden appointees. But the Fourth Circuit's reasoning closely resembles the kind of inquiry that courts frequently engage in when a federal law is struck down. When a court declares a provision of federal law unconstitutional, it often needs to ask whether other parts of the law should fall along with the unconstitutional provision, an inquiry known as 'severability.' Often, this severability analysis asks which hypothetical law Congress would have enacted if it had known that the one provision is invalid. The Fourth Circuit's decision in Owen is essentially a severability opinion. It takes as a given the Supreme Court's conclusion that laws protecting Dellinger and the MSPB members from being fired are unconstitutional, then asks which law Congress would have enacted if it had known that it could not protect MSPB members from political reprisal. The Fourth Circuit's conclusion is that, if Congress had known that MSPB members cannot be politically independent, then it would not have given them exclusive authority over civil service disputes. If the Supreme Court permits Trump to neutralize the MSPB, that would fundamentally change how the government functions The idea that civil servants should be hired based on merit and insulated from political pressure is hardly new. The first law protecting civil servants, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which President Chester A. Arthur signed into law in 1883. Laws like the Pendleton Act do more than protect civil servants who, say, resist pressure to deny government services to the president's enemies. They also make it possible for top government officials to actually do their jobs. Before the Pendleton Act, federal jobs were typically awarded as patronage — so when a Democratic administration took office, the Republicans who occupied most federal jobs would be fired and replaced by Democrats. This was obviously quite disruptive, and it made it difficult for the government to hire highly specialized workers. Why would someone go to the trouble of earning an economics degree and becoming an expert on federal monetary policy, if they knew that their job in the Treasury Department would disappear the minute their party lost an election? Meanwhile, the task of filling all of these patronage jobs overwhelmed new presidents. As Candice Millard wrote in a 2011 biography of President James A. Garfield, the last president elected before the Pendleton Act, when Garfield took office, a line of job seekers began to form outside the White House 'before he even sat down to breakfast.' By the time Garfield had eaten, this line 'snaked down the front walk, out the gate, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue.' Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job seeker, a fact that likely helped build political support for the Pendleton Act.
E&E News
29-05-2025
- General
- E&E News
How the Supreme Court could undercut FERC independence
The Supreme Court's conservative supermajority recently dealt a blow to nearly a century of precedent that has prevented presidents from firing independent agency heads without cause. Last week, the court approved President Donald Trump's request to reverse a lower court's ruling that blocked Trump from firing members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). 'Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents,' the court majority wrote. Advertisement The majority added that it did not 'ultimately decide' whether NLRB and MSPB fell within those narrow exceptions. But legal experts say the decision — made through the emergency or 'shadow' docket — signals that the Supreme Court is poised to undercut the historic independence of agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
