Second DOJ official who investigated Trump reassigned to immigration crackdown

The half-dozen top Justice Department officials have been told of his career.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal personnel matters.

Two of those reassigned, said a senior Justice Department official, were Corey Amundson, who had been chief of the public integrity section, and George Toscas, who had been deputy assistant attorney general in the National Security Division.

It was not previously known that Amundson had been reassigned. The Public Integrity Section prosecutes political corruption and played a role in both Justice Department criminal cases against the former president.

NBC News had previously reported that Toscas had been removed from his job. He played a key role in pushing for Mar-a-Lago’s 2022 search for classified documents that Donald Trump, then former president, refused to return to the National Archives.

All section chiefs in the Environmental and Natural Resources Division, which helps enforce environmental law, have also been reassigned to the Sanctuary Cities Task Force, a source told NBC News.

One of the environmental division officials wrote in an email that they had been assigned to the “Sanctuary Cities Environmental Task Force,” citing an email they received from the acting Attorney General that gave them 15 days’ notice to move to the new position.

“Everyone who doesn’t like it is being abandoned there,” another official said.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

It was unclear whether those reassigned would be asked to temporarily relocate to other cities or if the enforcement effort would be focused within the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington.

As NBC News previously reported, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a memo to the workforce on Wednesday outlining a series of policy changes designed to involve the Justice Department more in pursuing undocumented immigrants and violations of the law. of immigration.

The memo directed the department’s civil division to examine ways to take legal action against cities with so-called sanctuary laws that prohibit local officials from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. The memo also directed prosecutors to investigate the potential prosecution of any state or local officials who resist or fail to comply with federal immigration law enforcement.

Fear and anxiety

The moves come amid a series of other actions at the Justice Department that mirror what has happened within other federal agencies, including the cancellation of all diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs. The moves have stoked fear and anxiety among many career officials.

On Friday afternoon, the leader of the Justice Department’s gender equality effort, a career official in the Civil Rights Division, sent an email saying he was resigning. A source familiar with the matter said he made the move after he learned that the Office of Personnel Management was moving to close employee affinity groups across the federal government.

The official, Stacey Young, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times earlier this month about career employees’ concerns.

“To stay in our jobs, we will need more than exhortation; We will need legal, psychological and other support,” he wrote. “One reason many federal employees are thinking about leaving the government, often after decades of serving our country under Republican and Democratic presidents, is that we are afraid. Incoming government leaders have told us in aggressive terms that they want us to be gone or miserable.”

Two Justice Department officials said the DOJ has rescinded job offers to dozens of people in the Attorney General’s Honors program, a decades-long, highly competitive recruiting effort aimed at top law school graduates. Some internships have also reportedly been cancelled.

Trump administration officials say the moves were required as part of the president’s order imposing a 90-day federal hiring freeze. One former official said he saw interns crying after they were informed that their internships were being cancelled.



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