White House Takes Highly Unusual Step of Directly Firing Line Prosecutors

Two longtime career prosecutors have been suddenly fired by the White House, in what current and former Justice Department officials called an unusual and alarming exercise of presidential power.

In recent days, the prosecutors, in Los Angeles and Memphis, were dismissed abruptly, notified by a terse one-sentence email stating no reason for the move other than that it was on behalf of the president himself.

The ousters reflected a more aggressive effort by the White House to reach deep inside U.S. attorney offices across the country in a stark departure from decades of practice. While it is commonplace and accepted for senior political appointees at the Justice Department to change from administration to administration, no department veteran could recall any similar removal of assistant U.S. attorneys.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Asked about the ousters and whether others had been let go in a similar fashion, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, 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,” offering no explanation for how either of the two fired prosecutors might have done that. Prosecutors are part of the executive, not judicial, branch of government.

During his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to drastically reshape the ranks of career Justice Department officials, aggrieved by the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia in his first term and the four criminal indictments between his presidencies.

His allies and advisers have embraced the “unitary executive theory,” by which, its supporters argue, the president has sole control of the executive branch. His supporters have spoken openly about seizing pockets of independence in the executive branch. The Justice Department has a post-Watergate tradition of independence, buttressed by civil service laws that for many decades have protected career employees from summary dismissal by political leaders.

Already, the new administration has aggressively sought to remove the upper level of career lawyers at the Justice Department’s headquarters. Some of those firings may end up the subject of lawsuits, but even those dismissals were carried out by senior department officials, albeit Trump appointees.

Mr. Trump’s team has been screening people across the government, asking a series of questions that appear aimed at testing loyalty to the president and his worldview, including his false claim that he won the 2020 election.

The two prosecutors had both worked for many years as career officials inside the Justice Department.

One of the prosecutors, Adam Schleifer, was sitting at his computer Friday morning in Los Angeles, working on a case against Andrew Wiederhorn, the founder of Fatburger, according to two people familiar with the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Mr. Wiederhorn is fighting charges of wire fraud and other crimes related to his company.

While he was writing, he received an email from a White House official, Saurabh Sharma, saying that he had been terminated, one of the people said. No reason was cited.

Shocked and confused by the message, Mr. Schleifer asked supervisors if the email was some kind of hoax, the people said. He quickly discovered his work phone had been reset and he could no longer use office devices.

Mr. Schleifer, who worked in the corporate and securities fraud strike force, had spent years working on the Fatburger fraud case, and his colleagues suspected that may have played a role in his dismissal.

Current and former colleagues described Mr. Schleifer as an accomplished and fair prosecutor.

“Adam is a very smart, hard-working, impartial prosecutor. He is very dedicated to the job,” said Consuelo S. Woodhead, a retired federal prosecutor. “The man is honest. He is the kind of prosecutor one would want in a U.S. attorney’s office.

During the 2020 campaign cycle, he ran as a Democrat for Congress in New York. In that period, he occasionally took to social media to accuse Mr. Trump of denigrating the rule of law.

Still, he returned to the Justice Department at the tail end of the first Trump administration, just before Mr. Trump left office. But those social media posts were amplified by allies of the Trump White House last week, as Mr. Schleifer found himself dismissed.

Exactly one hour before he received the termination email, the far-right influencer Laura Loomer posted on social media about Mr. Schleifer, calling him a “Biden holdover” and referring to a five-year-old message of his in which he praised Adam B. Schiff, now a Democratic senator of California, and criticized Mr. Trump.

Many of Mr. Schleifer’s colleagues were fearful about what his dismissal signaled for the tradition not just of Justice Department independence, but of the independence of individual U.S. attorney offices, the two people said.

A day before Mr. Schleifer’s firing, a career attorney in Memphis, Reagan Fondren, received a similar email, saying that she had been terminated, according to a person familiar with events in her office, speaking on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss the matter. Like Mr. Schleifer, she also was not given a reason. At the time, Ms. Fondren had been serving as the acting U.S. attorney, a situation that is not unusual in the early days of a new presidential administration.

Mr. Schleifer’s dismissal was earlier reported by The Los Angeles Times and Ms. Fondren’s by the Daily Memphian.

While it is not unusual for acting U.S. attorneys to lose that position once a new administration selects a permanent successor, a career official like Ms. Fondren would typically return to her regular prosecutor position. In this instance, however, she was fired by the White House.