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.”