All the Justice and FBI employees who investigated Trump have left, deputy attorney general boasts
By Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN
(CNN) — Every Justice Department or FBI employee who worked on the criminal investigations into President Donald Trump has been fired, resigned, or took early retirement, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Thursday.
“There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” Blanche said during a fireside chat at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
At the Justice Department, Blanche said, that number amounts to “over 200” people. CNN has not independently verified that number.
Since the second Trump administration began, the Justice Department and FBI have gutted several offices whose work touched on high-profile cases, included the two prosecutions of Trump led by former special counsel Jack Smith. Both cases that Smith brought against Trump — one for retention of classified records and a second for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — were dropped before Trump returned to office in January 2025.
Their ousting fulfilled a Trump campaign promise: to rid the department of what he claimed was “weaponization” of justice against him and his supporters.
The firings have affected dozens of lawyers, FBI agents, and various members of support staff, CNN has reported.
In some cases, the employees received termination letters that said they couldn’t be “trusted” to “faithfully” implement Trump’s agenda because of their involvement in his prosecutions.
“You played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump. The proper functioning of government critically depends on the trust superior officials place in their subordinates,” then-acting Attorney General James McHenry wrote in one such letter in early 2025. “Given your significant role in prosecuting the President, I do not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully.”
Most recently, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen employees involved in the classified documents investigation.
The move was part of a wider internal investigation into actions taken in Smith’s investigation, which he launched after discovering records that showed the FBI used subpoenas to obtain his communication records and the communications of now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
The-CNN-Wire
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