Justice Dept. removes senior career officials from key positions

The Trump administration has removed or reassigned several top career officials in the Justice Department’s national security and criminal divisions, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

Two of the people said that at least 15 experienced career staffers across several divisions were removed from their positions and reassigned, a sign that the new president and his aides plan to carry out their promises to dramatically reshape the agency, including to focus more on immigration enforcement.

As a way to skirt legal protections afforded to career staffers, many of the officials were transferred to other positions inside Justice, where they would likely have less influence on the department’s big decisions, the people said. The officials will have to decide whether to stay in their new assignment or leave the agency.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Trump and his allies have long signaled they would make significant changes in the Justice Department’s national security division, which investigates and prosecutes cases related to terrorism, intelligence and other matters of national security. Trump and his allies are particularly angry at this section for its role in investigating his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left the presidency in 2021.

Among the people being removed from that division is deputy assistant attorney general George Toscas, who has served in the national security division since 2006, according to three people familiar with the matter. Two people familiar with the matter said he was transferred to a newly created Office of Sanctuary Cities Enforcement in the associate attorney general’s office.

Toscas was a top counterintelligence attorney who played a key role in deciding to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to retrieve the documents. He served as a deputy in the national security division during the first Trump administration.

Eun Young Choi, another deputy assistant attorney general in the national security division, and Bruce Swartz, a longtime deputy in the criminal division who focuses on international affairs, also were removed from their posts and reassigned elsewhere, the people familiar with the matter said.

While many officials at the Justice Department and other agencies often leave government at the start of a new administration, these removals and reassignments were unusual because they were ordered just as Trump took office, said Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who runs the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University.

Top deputy positions in the national security division are typically career positions, though it’s possible the Trump administration is removing the career people to replace them with political appointees, she said.

“I don’t believe there were ever any career people fired at transition since the national security division was founded,” McCord said. “One of the values of having career deputies in the national security division is consistency, institutional memory and the relationships that they build with our national security partners.”

On Monday night, hours after Trump’s inauguration, the Justice Department removed at least four top officials from the office inside the agency that operates the heavily backlogged U.S. immigration courts.

Federal guidelines call for a 120-day moratorium on certain staff reassignments after new, Senate-confirmed agency leaders start their appointments. But that moratorium is not yet in effect at Justice, where attorney general nominee Pam Bondi and other nominees to top positions are still going through the confirmation process.

For now, James McHenry, a longtime immigration enforcement official at the Justice Department, is running the agency as acting U.S. attorney general. McHenry served during the Biden administration as the Justice Department’s chief administrative hearing officer, a position that oversaw the department’s administrative judges. During the first Trump administration, he directed the Executive Office of Immigration Review.

Some experts say that incoming agency heads and political supervisors are not allowed to have other officials carry out reassignments before they arrive just to avoid the moratorium.

If the reassignments are a way to remove career leadership, it’s “very concerning,” said a former senior department official, who like the others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss changes that had not been made public.

‘’The beating heart of Justice Department is the career workforce,’’ the former official said. “That’s what really makes the department run, not the political relationship.’’