Washington – was at the end of the afternoon on the last Friday of June, and US prosecutor Mike Gordon was in his office in Tampa, Florida, interviewing a victim for an upcoming trial through Zoom.
Together with a special agent, Gordon was preparing the victim to witness in a case of the Department of Justice against a lawyer that the Department of Justice claimed that he had been scaming customers.
There was a blow to the door, Gordon later told NBC News, and did not respond; In the United States Prosecutor’s Office in the Middle District of Florida, there was a culture not only to appear when the door is closed. But the door opened, and there was the manager of the office, with a ash face.
The office manager is in charge of security, and Gordon thought for a moment that something could have happened to his family. Gordon silenced Zoom’s call and the office manager gave him a role.
It was a letter from a page signed by the Attorney General Pam Bondi. He had been fired from the federal service.
“Without explanation. Without early warning. There is no description of what the cause was,” Gordon said in an interview. “Now, I knew why. I knew it had to be my work on January 6.”
Gordon had been a senior litigating lawyer in the siege section of the Capitol of the United States Prosecutor’s Office in Washington, which prosecuted alleged uprooters involved in the January 6 attack against the United States Capitol. His title reflected some of the high profile cases that he had assumed during the investigation of January 6 and the role he played to help other federal prosecutors.
At the time of his dismissal, Gordon had been working for a long time in other cases at Casa in Florida. Recently it had been assigned to co-lead a case against two people accused of stealing more than $ 100 million of a medical trust for people with disabilities, as well as injured workers and retirees. Only two days before being fired, he had received an “outstanding” qualification in his performance review.
Now, along with two other employees of the recently dismissed department of justice, Gordon is going back, demanding the Trump administration on Thursday night for their layoffs. The lawsuit argues that normal procedures are expected to be federal employees to address their complaints, the Merit Systems Protection Board are fundamentally broken due to the actions of the Trump administration.
MSPB is a quadjudicial body that is intended to resolve disputes between employees and their agencies, but the demand argues that “it cannot work as planned” due to the dismissal of President Donald Trump to the MSPB member of MSPB Cathy Harris. A Federal Court issued a permanent court order that restored Harris, but the Supreme Court suspended the court order, allowing Harris to eliminate. Now, the MSPB lacks a quorum to vote on any request for review, while MSPB administrative judges are “overwhelmed” due to the termination of the government of thousands of federal employees.
Gordon filed the lawsuit with Patricia Hartman, who was the main spokesman for the United States Prosecutor’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, a veteran of the FBI and La Marina, had 19 years of federal civil service, along with six years of military service, when he was fired.
Hartman, who had worked for several components of the Department of Justice for almost two decades, supervised the news statements and the responses of the media related to the prosecutions of January 6, which was the largest investigation in the history of the FBI, which involved more than 1,500 accused.
“They never gave me an explanation for my termination,” Hartman told NBC News. “According to my performance reviews, which have always been outstanding, I have to believe that something else was promoting this. The conclusion is this, in my opinion, it is equivalent to psychological terrorism. You are eliminating people who were good or excellent in their work without explanation.”
The lawyers of the lawsuit are Abbe Lowell, Norm Eisen, Heidi Burakiewicz and Mark Zaid, a complainant lawyer who has been attacked by the Trump administration, who stripped his security authorization after Trump appointed him in an executive order. Zaid has sued since then.
The new administration has fired approximately 200 employees of the Department of Justice, according to Justice Connection, an organization that was created to support the employees of the Department of Justice.
“The way in which these employees have ended seems a fairly clear violation of the Civil Service Protection Law and the general protections of due constitutional process, and has been destabilizing for the workforce, because nobody knows when they will be the next one,” said Stacy Young, a former employee of the Department of Justice. “I heard employees all the time they tell me to wake up in the morning terrified that today is their day. Many of them feel like psychological war.”
Gordon was fired the same day that two other prosecutors on January 6 were fired last month. He began as a state prosecutor in New York City and began his federal prosecutor in January 2017, working in the Violent Crimes and Narcotics Section. When he saw what happened on January 6 and the call came out within the Department of Justice for his aid in the prosecution of those involved, he registered, he told NBC News.
Jason Manning, a former federal prosecutor who worked in the cases of January 6, said Gordon executed consecutive judgments “without problems” and played a fundamental role in supporting others in the unit.
“In a great team of excellent and workers, Mike really stood out as a team leader, as someone who prosecuted some of the most notorious defendants and some of the most observed and high pressure and critical cases,” said Manning.
Among them was the case against Ray EPPS, who was the objective of false conspiracy theories that claimed that it was a plant from the federal government, before he was finally accused by federal prosecutors, who tried to send it to prison for six months. A judge finally sentenced EPPs to probation, citing the impact that conspiracy theories had on his life.
After Trump became the republican presidential candidate last year, federal prosecutors who worked in the cases of January 6 knew that there was a risk to their work, and made dark jokes about what could happen to them if Trump returned to office, multiple sources close to the Department of Justice said to NBC News. Now, those fears have become a reality.
When he returned to office, Trump quickly forgave on January 6 of the mass defendants, and federal trial prosecutors who worked in the cases of January 6 were fired, as well as the people who worked in Trump’s investigation by Trump by Trump by Trump by Trump of Trump. The current FBI employees who worked at the Smith and the probes of January 6 still wonder what could happen to them in the future after the Department of Justice demanded a list of employees who worked on those investigations.
“The people who offered as volunteers for that detail are some of the best, smarter and talented lawyers in the country,” said Gordon, referring to the prosecutors of January 6. “It is not that in some way the administration only patted the back and say: ‘great, like, all these are deep state democrats that we are driving.’ That is not what is happening.
