.jfif?w=696&resize=696,0&ssl=1 "DOJ fires officials who worked on Jack Smith’s Trump investigations")
DOJ fires officials who worked on Jack Smith’s Trump investigations The Justice Department fired officials who worked on the special counsel team that investigated Donald Trump in two separate criminal cases, a spokesman said.
The Pentagon rolled out the welcome mat for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on his first full day on the job, who noted that the military personnel would most probably head down to the southern border soon with about 4,000 already there. As one of the very first directives after the confirmation, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives bore the brunt.
Transgender inmate sues: A federal prisoner sued over President Trump’s executive order aimed at transgender inmates, requiring trans women to be held in prisons designated for men and halting gender-transition medical treatments for inmates. Read more ›
Confirmation hearings: Several of Mr. Trump’s most contentious choices for top administration posts will be quizzed by senators this week. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for health secretary and fierce critic of vaccines, will appear for hearings on Wednesday and Thursday. Tulsi Gabbard, the pick for director of national intelligence, and Kash Patel, who is bidding to become F.B.I. director, will testify separately on Thursday.
READ MORE: Trump administration fires Justice Department lawyers who
Treat Colombia: The Trump administration indicated that it won’t impose tariffs on Colombia as that South American country stepped back and expressed readiness to take its military deportation flights.
The Justice Dept.’s top career officer is being reassigned, and its chief corruption prosecutor has resigned
Trump appointees in the Justice Department are reassigning the department’s senior career official, Bradley Weinsheimer, who oversaw a range of sensitive interactions involving prosecutors, Mr. Trump’s legal team, and the Biden White House, according to two people briefed on the move.
The transfer of Mr. Weinsheimer, the associate deputy attorney general, is part of a broader effort by the Trump team to assert greater direct control over department headquarters.
It comes as the follow-up to a similar reassignment of some of the department’s most experienced and highly-regarded supervisors, including top officials who are experts on national security, international investigations, extraditions, and public corruption. On Monday, one of them, the chief of the public integrity section, resigned.
It is too early to determine who will eventually fill their slots.
Like many of the other officials who have received transfer emails, Mr. Weinsheimer has been offered the chance to transfer into the department’s sanctuary cities task force offer seen by some in the same situation as an effort to force them out.
This is the most obvious indication yet of how the Trump team is moving quickly to remove officials who might thwart, slow down, or reverse steps they view as inappropriate from political appointees.
Mr. Weinsheimer is a three-decade veteran of the department and played an important role under several administrations often as a neutral referee in resolving tricky ethical issues or interactions that needed a critical arbiter.
He was assigned to his current post acting by Attorney Jeff Sessions in July 2018 as part of Mr. Trump’s first term; the appointment was made permanent by a successor to Mr. Sessions, William P. Barr.
Mr Weinsheimer also spent four years in the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which probes complaints about prosecutors. An email to his government account wasn’t returned immediately.
In 2021, Mr. Weinsheimer cleared the way for former Trump administration officials to testify before Congress about the president’s actions after the 2020 elections — over the objection of the Trump legal team. But transcripts showed he tried to strictly limit the scope of questioning, to the ire of Democratic committee staff members.
Mr. Weinsheimer also led the point for the department in a prickly series of exchanges with lawyers for President Biden over the addition of the intensely damaging assessment of the former president’s mental acuity contained in the special counsel report on Mr. Biden’s handling of classified information.
Resigning the head of the Justice Department’s public integrity section on Monday, highlighted the effect of the reassigning career officials by the Trump administration.
It was recently made known to the chief that Corey Amundson would be reassigned to work on immigration. Mr. Amundson is one of many senior career officials told he was being sent to work on a task force focused on sanctuary complex jurisdictions that are likely to refuse cooperation with administration officials seeking to accelerate deportations and immigration arrests.
In his resignation letter, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Amundson wrote about the many landmark corruption cases he had overseen during his 26 years in the department.
I spent the entire professional life dedicated to the apolitical enforcement of federal criminal law and to making sure all those around me understood and embraced that central tenet of our work,” he wrote in his resignation letter to the acting attorney general, James R. McHenry. “I am proud of my service and wish you the best in seeking justice on behalf of the American people.”.
He said he hoped the agency successfully carried out Mr. Trump’s agenda, “including protecting all Americans from the scourge of violent crime and public corruption.”.
