By Steve Neavling
The White House has suddenly fired two longtime career federal prosecutors in Los Angeles and Memphis, a move current and former Justice Department officials described as highly unusual and alarming.
Both prosecutors received a one-sentence email stating they were dismissed on behalf of the president, with no further explanation.
The firings mark a break from long-standing norms. While it’s expected for political appointees to change with administrations, officials said they couldn’t recall a similar removal of assistant U.S. attorneys—career civil servants traditionally shielded from political purges.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The White House, in coordination with the Department of Justice, has dismissed more than 50 U.S. attorneys and deputies in the past few weeks.” She added, “The American people deserve a judicial branch full of honest arbiters of the law who want to protect democracy, not subvert it.” (Prosecutors are part of the executive, not judicial, branch.)
Former President Donald Trump has long pledged to reshape the Justice Department, angered by the Russia investigation and multiple criminal indictments. His advisers have embraced the “unitary executive theory,” asserting the president has full control of the executive branch, and have spoken about eliminating internal pockets of independence.
One of the fired prosecutors, Adam Schleifer, was working on a fraud case in Los Angeles against Fatburger founder Andrew Wiederhorn when he received the email from White House official Saurabh Sharma, according to two people familiar with the matter. Schleifer, stunned, asked supervisors whether the message was a hoax—only to find his work phone had been reset and he was locked out of office systems.
The other prosecutor, based in Memphis, also had a long tenure in the Justice Department. Both were career officials, not political appointees.
