How the Trump administration erased centuries of Justice Department experience

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Politics
How the Trump administration erased centuries of Justice Department experience

By ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER
Updated 5:55 PM EST, January 16, 2026

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michael Ben’Ary was driving one of his children to soccer practice on an October evening last year when he paused at a red light to check his work phone. He was in the middle of a counterterrorism prosecution so important that President Donald Trump highlighted it in his address to Congress. ... Ben’Ary said he was shocked to see his phone had been disabled. He found the explanation later in his personal email account, a letter informing him he had been fired.

A veteran prosecutor, Ben’Ary handled high-profile cases over two decades at the Justice Department, including the murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and a suicide bomb plot targeting the U.S. Capitol. Most recently he was leading the case arising from a deadly attack on American service members in Afghanistan. ... Yet the same credentials that enhanced Ben’Ary’s résumé spelled the undoing of his government career.

His termination without explanation came hours after right-wing commentator Julie Kelly told hundreds of thousands of online followers that Ben’Ary had previously served as a senior counsel to Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 Justice Department official in Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration. Kelly also suggested Ben’Ary was part of the “internal resistance” to prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey, even though Ben’Ary was never involved in the case.

As Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, approaches her first year on the job, the firings of lawyers such as Ben’Ary have defined her turbulent tenure. The terminations and a larger voluntary exodus of lawyers have erased centuries of combined experience and left the department with fewer career employees to act as a bulwark for the rule of law at a time when Trump, a Republican, is testing the limits of executive power by demanding prosecutions of his political enemies.

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