How the Trump administration erased centuries of Justice Department experience

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michael Ben'Ary was driving one of his children to soccer practice on an October evening last year when he paused at a red light to check his work phone. He was in the middle of a counterterrorism prosecution so important that President Donald Trump highlighted it in his address to Congress.

Ben'Ary said he was shocked to see his phone had been disabled. He found the explanation later in his personal email account, a letter informing him he had been fired.

A veteran prosecutor, Ben'Ary handled high-profile cases over two decades at the Justice Department, including the murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and a suicide bomb plot targeting the U.S. Capitol. Most recently he was leading the case arising from a deadly attack on American service members in Afghanistan.

Yet the same credentials that enhanced Ben'Ary's résumé spelled the undoing of his government career.

His termination without explanation came hours after right-wing commentator Julie Kelly told hundreds of thousands of online followers that Ben'Ary had previously served as a senior counsel to Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 Justice Department official in Democratic President Joe Biden's administration. Kelly also suggested Ben'Ary was part of the “internal resistance” to prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey, even though Ben’Ary was never involved in the case.

As Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, approaches her first year on the job, the firings of lawyers such as Ben’Ary have defined her turbulent tenure. The terminations and a larger voluntary exodus of lawyers have erased centuries of combined experience and left the department with fewer career employees to act as a bulwark for the rule of law at a time when Trump, a Republican, is testing the limits of executive power by demanding prosecutions of his political enemies.

Interviews by The Associated Press of more than a half-dozen fired employees offer a snapshot of the toll throughout the department. The departures include lawyers who prosecuted violent attacks on police at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; environmental, civil rights and ethics enforcers; counterterrorism prosecutors; immigration judges; and attorneys who defend administration policies. This week, several prosecutors in Minnesota moved to resign amid turmoil over an investigation into the shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

“To lose people at that career level, people who otherwise intended to stay and now are either being discharged or themselves are walking away, is immensely damaging to the public interest,” said Stuart Gerson, a senior official in the George H.W. Bush administration and acting attorney general early in Bill Clinton's administration. “We’re losing really capable people, people who have never viewed themselves as political and attempted to do the right thing.”

Justice Connection, a network of department alums, estimates that more than 230 lawyers, agents and other employees from across the department were fired last year, apparently because of their work on cases they were assigned or past criticism of Trump, or seemingly no reason. More than 6,400 employees are estimated to have left a department that at the end of 2025 had roughly 108,000, the group says.

The Justice Department says it has hired thousands of career attorneys over the past year. The Trump administration has characterized some of the fired and departed workers as out of step with its agenda.

Ben'Ary left with unfinished business, including the prosecution stemming from the airport bombing in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and the national security unit he led at the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Left to pack his belongings, he posted a typed note near his door that functioned as a distress call, reminding colleagues they had sworn an oath to follow the facts “without fear or favor” and “unhindered by political interference.”

But, he warned, “In recent months, the political leadership of the Department have violated these principles, jeopardizing our national security and making American citizens less safe.”

Since its founding in 1870, the Justice Department has occupied elevated status in American democracy, sustained through transitions of power by reliance on facts, evidence and law.

To be sure, there has always been a political component to the department, with lawyers appointed by the president.

But even during turbulent times, when attorneys general have been pushed out by presidents or resigned rather than accede to White House demands — as in the Watergate-era “Saturday Night Massacre" — the department's rank and file have generally been insulated thanks to long-recognized civil service protections.

“This is completely unprecedented in both its scale and scope and underlying motivation,” said Peter Keisler, a senior official in the George W. Bush Justice Department.

In his first term, Trump pushed out one attorney general and accepted another's resignation, but the workforce remained largely intact. He returned to office in January 2025 seething over Biden-era prosecutions of him and vowing retribution.

The firings began even before Bondi arrived in February. Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith's team that investigated Trump were terminated days after the inauguration, followed by prosecutors hired on temporary assignments for cases resulting from the Capitol insurrection in 2021.

"The people working on these cases were not political agents of any kind,” said Aliya Khalidi, a Jan. 6 prosecutor who was fired. “It’s all people who just care about the rule of law.”

The firings have continued, at times surgical, at times random and almost always without explanation.

Adam Schleifer, a Los Angeles prosecutor targeted in a social media post by far-right activist Laura Loomer over past critical comments of Trump, was fired in March. The Justice Department the following month fired attorney Erez Reuveni, who conceded in court that Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported. Reuveni later accused the department of trying to mislead judges to execute deportations. Department officials deny the assertion.

Two weeks after Maurene Comey completed a sex trafficking trial against Sean “Diddy” Combs, the New York prosecutor was fired, also without explanation. Like Ben'Ary, she wrote a pointed farewell, telling colleagues that “fear is the tool of a tyrant.” Her father, the former FBI director who was a frequent Trump target, said those same words after being indicted in September in a case that has been dismissed.

Among the most affected sections is the storied Civil Rights Division. A recent open letter of protest was signed by more than 200 employees who left in 2025, with several supervisors recently giving notice of plans to depart. The Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes sensitive public corruption cases, has also been hollowed out by resignations.

The Justice Department has disputed the accounts of some of those who have been fired or quit and has defended the termination of those who investigated Trump as “consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”

“This is the most efficient Department of Justice in American history, and our attorneys will continue to deliver measurable results for the American people,” the department said in a statement. More than 3,400 career attorneys have been hired since Trump took office, the department says.

The departures have caused backlogs and staff shortages, with senior leaders soliciting job applications. It has affected the department’s daily business as well as efforts to fulfill Trump’s desires to prosecute political opponents.

Desperate for lawyers willing to file criminal cases against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, the administration in September forced out the veteran U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, replacing him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide with no experience as a federal prosecutor.

Halligan secured the indictments but the win was short-lived.

One judge later identified grave missteps in how Halligan presented the Comey case to a grand jury. Another dismissed both prosecutions outright, calling Halligan's appointment unlawful.

Smith, the special counsel who investigated Trump but left before he could be fired, has himself lamented the losses. “These are not partisans,” he recently told lawmakers.

“They just want to do good work,” he added, “and I think when you lose that culture, you lose a lot.”

Khalidi joined the department in 2023 in a group of new prosecutors hired to help with the hundreds of cases stemming from the Capitol riot.

Upon Trump's return to the White House, she watched cases she prosecuted get dismantled by Trump’s sweeping clemency for all 1,500 defendants charged in the riot, including those who attacked police.

Less than two weeks later, a Justice Department demand for the names of FBI agents involved in Jan. 6 investigations triggered rumors of potential mass firings. Worried about the agents she worked with, Khalidi spent the day checking in on them. But as she started preparing dinner one Friday evening, she received an email suggesting she had lost her own job.

Attached was a memo from then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordering the firings of prosecutors such as Khalidi who had been hired for temporary assignments but were moved into permanent roles after Trump’s win, a maneuver Bove called “subversive personnel actions by the previous administration.” Neither the email nor memo identified the fired prosecutors, leaving them to guess.

Khalidi grabbed a suitcase to collect family photos and other personal items she kept at work and rushed to the office, retreating with fellow shocked prosecutors to a bar where they received termination emails.

The group of 15 fired attorneys later assembled to surrender their computers and phones, entering the same room where they gathered on their first day in 2023.

“For a lot of us, our dream was to be federal prosecutors,” Khalidi said. “And so we had happy memories of that room, of being excited on our first day. So it was just kind of surreal to be back there turning in our stuff.”

The news came for Anam Petit, an immigration judge, during a break between hearings.

Hired during the Biden administration, she said she felt a little uneasy when Trump won the election but also figured her position would probably be safe because immigration judges generally have job stability and because they bear responsibility for issuing removal orders for those who are in the United States illegally, a core presidential priority.

Petit arrived on Sept. 5 bracing for bad news because it was the Friday of the pay period before her two-year work anniversary, when her probationary appointment was poised to become permanent. Though she said she had received strong performance reviews and had already exceeded her case completion goal for the year, she had become anxious as colleagues were fired amid an administration push to accelerate deportations.

She was in the courtroom between hearings when she learned via email that she had been fired. She left to text her husband, then returned to the courtroom to render a decision in the case before her.

“I just put my phone back in my pocket and went into the courtroom and delivered my decision, with a very shaky voice and shaky hands, trying to center myself back to that decision just so that I could relay it,” Petit said.

Joseph Tirrell was mindful of his job security from the very start of the Trump administration. As the department's chief ethics officer, he had affirmed that Smith, the special counsel, was entitled to a law firm's free legal services, a decision he sensed had the potential to rile incoming leadership.

But he remained in the position and over the ensuing months counseled Bondi's staff on the propriety of accepting various gifts, including a cigar box from mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor.

He was fired in July, just before a FIFA Club World Cup final in New Jersey that Tirrell had said Bondi could not ethically accept a free invitation to. He was not terribly surprised, he says, when it was later reported that Bondi attended in Trump's box. The Justice Department said in a statement that none of Tirrell's advice “was ever overruled” and that "the Attorney General obtained ethics approval to attend this event in her official capacity as a member of the FIFA Task Force.”

“There’s a great deal of fear there just because I was fired and just because so many others were summarily fired,” Tirrell said. “Are you going to get fired because you provided ethics advice? Are you going to get fired because you have a pride flag on your desk?”

Trump was promoting his administration's commitment to counterterrorism during his address to Congress in March when he announced a success: the capture of a militant from the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate who was charged in the Kabul airport bombing that killed 13 American service members during the 2021 withdrawal from the country.

Mohammad Sharifullah arrived the following day in the United States, encountering Ben’Ary in an Alexandria, Virginia, courtroom.

Ben'Ary spent the next several months working on the case, but on Oct. 1, he was fired. It was the apparent result, he told colleagues, of a social media post he said contained “false information" — a reference to the one from Kelly, the commentator.

The termination was so abrupt that Ben'Ary could not tell his colleagues where he had saved important filings and notes. Another prosecutor listed on the case, James Comey's son-in-law, Troy Edwards, had resigned days earlier upon Comey’s indictment. Once set for trial last month, the case has been postponed.

In his farewell note, Ben'Ary observed that he was not alone, that in “just a few short months” career employees like himself had been removed from U.S. attorneys offices, the FBI “and other critical parts of DOJ."

“While I am no longer your colleague, I ask that each of you continue to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons,” Ben'Ary wrote. “Follow the facts and the law. Stand up for what we all believe in — our Constitution and the rule of law. Our country depends on you.”

Anam Petit, a former Justice Department employee, poses for a portrait in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Moriah Ratner)

Anam Petit, a former Justice Department employee, poses for a portrait in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Moriah Ratner)

Anam Petit, a former Justice Department employee, poses for a portrait in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Moriah Ratner)

Attorney General Pam Bondi arrives before President Donald Trump speaks during an event to honor the 2025 Stanley Cup Champion Florida Panthers in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Anam Petit, a former Justice Department employee, poses for a portrait in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Moriah Ratner)

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) — Mohamad Al-Assi ran beneath the concrete wall as the sun rose over Bethlehem. His Nikes pounded the gravel, his breath fogging the air as graffiti and paint splatter blurred past with each stride.

The road along the barrier separating Israel from the occupied West Bank makes up a stretch of a marathon route that Al-Assi and thousands of others ran on Friday. The event is open to people in other parts of the world running in solidarity with the Palestinians and another, shorter race was happening in Gaza.

The race, known as the Palestine Marathon, was held for the first time in three years and was among the first big international events in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Festivals, conferences and holiday festivities that once drew thousands have been scaled back or canceled because of the war in Gaza and heightened Israeli restrictions.

It marked a turning point for Al-Assi, 27, who was released from Israeli detention six months ago. Video from that day shows him gaunt-faced and hollow-eyed, his once muscular legs weakened after more than two and a half years of prison.

He began training in December, gradually upping his mileage every month since. He ran 62 miles (100 kilometers) that first month, and in April reached 135 miles (217 kilometers), according to his account on the tracking app Strava.

He jogs in the morning after his mother wakes him up in their home in Dheisheh, a Palestinian refugee camp made up of graffiti-covered cinderblock homes in tangled alleyways.

“The main difficulties we face are the cars on the roads and the presence of Israeli security forces along the route where I train,” Al-Assi said.

He had to suspend his training several times because of military operations in the camp.

“I would return home feeling hopeless because I couldn't do what I had intended to do,” Al-Assi said.

In the West Bank, runners cannot complete a 26.2-mile (42.2-kilometer) course without hitting a checkpoint or military gate, which is why Friday's marathon route looped around the same circuit twice.

They ran up through the narrow streets of two Palestinian refugee camps and down to a farming town next to Bethlehem where fields are divided by the concrete wall, barbed wire and cameras. The course hooked back to finish at Bethlehem’s Manger Square.

Organizers say the race highlights restrictions facing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where checkpoints can disrupt even routine commutes and where open land for hiking, biking and running is increasingly taken by Israeli settlements and outposts.

“Marathon runners anywhere may ‘hit a wall’ under the physical and emotional strain of completing the 42-kilometer race course," they said on the marathon's website.

But in the West Bank, they added, "runners literally hit the Wall.”

At a time when the West Bank’s economy is struggling and in the shadow of Gaza's fragile ceasefire and stalled rebuilding efforts, the atmosphere in Bethlehem was celebratory. Crowds gathered near the Church of the Nativity to cheer runners at the race's early morning start and finish. Bagpipes blared and drummers pounded out traditional rhythms through streets along the route.

On a beachside road in Nuseirat in central Gaza — which is roughly the length of a marathon — 15 disabled people, including amputees, ran a 2K, and a couple thousand of people ran a 5K. Thirteen years after the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, canceled a 2013 marathon because Hamas forbade women from participating, the women were back.

Haya Alnaji, a 22-year-old woman who ran in the 5K, said the number of people taking part reflected that Palestinians in Gaza were determined to live and persevere despite the devastation wrought by more than two years of war.

“All of Gaza loves sports,” she said.

Al-Assi was arrested in April 2023, and imprisoned under administrative detention, which allows Israel to hold detainees for months without charge. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Palestinians are being held under that system, according to Israeli rights groups and the Palestinian Prisoners Society.

In October 2023, Al-Assi was sentenced for transferring money to suspicious entities, a charge he denies. Israel closely monitors money transfers — particularly to Gaza — for fear that funds could end up in the hands of militants. Palestinians, however, say donations and charitable contributions are often swept up in the dragnet. Israel’s military, Shin Bet and Prison Service did not answer questions about Al-Assi's charges.

In Israeli prisons — where detainees routinely complain of inadequate diets — Al-Assi said nearly everyone goes hungry. The weight he lost eroded the endurance built through 10 years of training.

“I have more muscle mass than fat, so when I lost weight, the loss came from my muscles rather than fat,” he said. “This had a major impact on my physical fitness.”

He also had to regain the mental fortitude to run a marathon.

“I was emotionally shattered after spending such a long period in prison,” he said.

On Friday, he collapsed to his knees, bowing and thanking God after finishing second overall, as supporters and journalists encircled him. He dedicated his run to Palestinians still in Israeli detention.

“After 32 months in prison, Mohamad Al-Assi is first in his class!” he shouted through tears, raising his hands and looking up to the sky.

__ Imad Isseid contributed from Bethlehem, West Bank and Abdel Kareem Hana from Nuseirat, Gaza Strip.

A Palestinian amputee runner takes part in the 2-kilometer Palestine Marathon along the coastal road near Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, Friday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinian runners take part in the 5-kilometer Palestine Marathon along the coastal road near Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, Friday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Runners participate in the Palestine Marathon in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Friday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Runners pass by Israel's separation wall as they compete in the Palestine Marathon in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Friday, May 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Palestinian Mohamad Al-Assi, who was released from Israeli detention six months ago, runs past Israel's separation wall as he trains ahead of the Palestine Marathon in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Thursday, May 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Sam Metz)