Washington-It was at the end of the afternoon on the last Friday in June, and the assistant lawyer of the United States Mike Gordon was in his office in Tampa, Florida, interviewing a victim for a future trial via Zoom.
In addition to a special agent, Gordon was preparing the victim to witness a case in a case of the Ministry of Justice against a lawyer who, according to the Ministry of Justice, had scammed customers.
He was struck at the door, Gordon later told NBC News, and he did not respond; At the office of the American lawyer in the Florida intermediary district, there was a culture of not only emerging when the door is closed. But the door opened, and there was the office director, Ashen in the face.
The office director is responsible for security, and Gordon thought for a moment that something could have happened to his family. Gordon attenuated the zoom call and the office director set him a piece of paper.
It was a letter from a page signed by the Attorney General Pam Bondi. He had been terminated from the federal service.
“No explanation. No early warning. No description of the cause,” said Gordon in an interview. “Now I knew why. I knew it should be my work on January 6.”
Gordon had been a main lawyer for the trial in the headquarters of the Capitol of the American prosecutor’s office in Washington, who continued alleged rioters involved in the January 6 attack on the American Capitol. His title reflected some of the highly publicized cases he had taken during the January 6 investigation and the role he played by helping other federal prosecutors.
At the time of his dismissal, Gordon had worked for a long time on other cases at home in Florida. He had recently been responsible for co-directing a case against two people accused of having stolen more than $ 100 million to a medical trust for disabled people, as well as workers and injured retirees. Only two days before his dismissal, he had received an “exceptional” note on his performance exam.
Now, with two other recently dismissed employees of the Ministry of Justice, Gordon repelled, continuing the Trump administration on Thursday evening for their layoffs. The prosecution argues that the normal procedures of federal employees should undergo to combat their grievances – the Merit Systems Protection Board – are fundamentally broken due to the actions of the Trump administration.
The MSPB is an almost judicial body which aims to settle disputes between employees and their agencies, but the trial maintains that it “cannot work as planned” due to the dismissal by President Donald Trump of Cathy Harris, member of the MSPB. A Federal Court has published a permanent injunction reintegrating Harris, but the Supreme Court aroused the injunction, allowing Harris’s dismissal. Now, the MSPB has no quorum to vote on all revision petitions, while MSPB administrative judges are “exceeded” due to the government’s dismissal of thousands of federal employees.
Gordon filed the trial alongside Patricia Hartman, who was a high-level spokesperson for the American prosecutor’s office for the District of Columbia, and Joseph Tirrell, who was director of the Ethics Department office, before the Trump administration rejects them this year. Tirrell, an FBI and the Navy veteran, had 19 years of federal public service, as well as six years of military service, when he was dismissed.
Hartman, who had worked for various components of the Ministry of Justice for almost two decades, supervised press releases and media responses linked to the prosecution of January 6, which was the largest survey in the history of the FBI, involving more than 1,500 defendants.
“I have never had any explanation for my dismissal,” Hartman told NBC News. “Based on my performance criticisms, which have always been exceptional, I must believe that something else was driving this. The main thing is that, in my mind, is equivalent to psychological terrorism. You remove people who were good or excellent in their work without explanation.”
The lawyers of the trial are Abbe Lowell, Norm Eisen, Heidi Burakiewicz and Mark Zaid, a denouncing lawyer who was targeted by the Trump administration, who stripped his security authorization After Trump named in an executive decree. Zaid has since been prosecuted.
The new administration has dismissed around 200 employees of the Ministry of Justice, according to Justice Connection, an organization which was created to support employees of the Ministry of Justice.
“The way in which these employees have been dismissed seem to be a fairly clear violation of the law on the protection of the public service and general protections of regular procedure, and this has been destabilizing for the workforce, because no one knows when they are going to be the next,” said Stacy Young, a former employee of the Ministry of Justice. “I hear employees all the time telling me that they wake up in the morning terrified that today will be their day. It is for many of them as a psychological war. ”
Gordon was dismissed On the same day, two other prosecutors on January 6 were dismissed last month. He had started as a state prosecutor in New York and began his career as a federal prosecutor in January 2017, working in the section of violent crimes and drugs. When he saw what happened on January 6 and the appeal takes place within the Ministry of Justice to obtain prosecution for those involved, he signed up, he told NBC News.
Jason Manning, a former federal prosecutor who worked in the cases of January 6Also, said that Gordon has carried out consecutive “perfectly” tests and played an essential role by supporting others in the unit.
“In a large team of excellent and workers, Mike really stood out as a team leader, as a person who has pursued some of the most notorious accused and some of the most watched and high -pressure and critical cases,” said Manning.
Among them was the case against Ray Epps, who was the Target of false conspiracy theories Affirming that it was a factory of the federal government, before it was ultimately charged by federal prosecutors, who sought to send it to prison for six months. A judge finally condemned EPPS to probationCiting the impact of conspiracy theories on his life.
After Trump became the Republican presidential candidate last year, the federal prosecutors working on the cases of January 6 knew that there was a risk for their work, and they made dark jokes on what could happen to them if Trump was back in office, several sources close to the Ministry of Justice had declared to NBC News. Now these fears have become a reality.
When he returned to the post, Trump quickly pardoned the defendants of January 6 en masse, and the federal prosecutors that worked on the cases of January 6 were dismissed, just like the people who worked on The Jack Smith special council investigation into Trump. The current FBI employees who worked on the Smith probes and on January 6 still wonder what could happen to them at the bottom of the road after the Ministry of Justice demanded a list of employees who worked on these surveys.
“People who volunteered for this detail are among the best smart and most talented lawyers in the country,” said Gordon, referring to the January 6 prosecutors. “It is not that the administration should simply tap the back and say:” Super, as, it is all Democrats of the deep state that we conduct. “This is not what is happening.
