WASHINGTON — The White House’s firing of a career federal prosecutor last week was one in a series of Trump administration moves that have undermined the post-Watergate separation between the White House and the Justice Department — and spread fears about political interference in ongoing criminal cases.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Schleifer, based in Los Angeles, was told by a White House official in an email Friday that he was being terminated. The email came from Saurabh Sharma of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, two sources told NBC News.
The office handles roughly 4,000 political appointees within the executive branch, but it isn’t involved in hiring career employees.
Presidents appoint the 93 U.S. attorneys that serve as top federal prosecutors in jurisdictions around the country, but not the thousands of career prosecutors, known as assistant U.S. attorneys.
A former longtime veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California told NBC News that Schleifer was well respected by those in supervisory positions, calling him “an excellent prosecutor, very hard-working, very smart” who was aggressive but also adhered closely to ethical standards.
“The whole thing is bizarre. It’s extremely unusual for a line AUSA to be fired by the president of the United States. It’s insane,” the former official said.
The firing of Schleifer came roughly an hour after right-wing influencer Laura Loomer resurfaced comments that Schleifer had made about Trump during an unsuccessful run for Congress in New York.
“Fire him. He supported the impeachment of President Trump and said he wanted to repeal Trump’s tax plan,” Loomer wrote. “We need to purge the US Attorney’s office of all leftist Trump haters.”
Schleifer was not a federal employee at the time of his 2020 comments, in which he called for the repeal of Trump’s tax plan and said that Trump “erodes our constitutional integrity every day with every lie and ever act of heedless, narcissistic corruption.” Schleifer had left his career position in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California before his race for Congress. He was rehired by the office in January 2021, when Trump was still in the White House.
Not long after Loomer’s post Friday, Schleifer got the email notifying him of his termination.
The Trump administration has operated under a more expansive theory of presidential power within the executive branch than his predecessors, essentially holding that the power of the executive branch is fully vested in the presidency and that Trump has the power to do as he wishes with executive agencies and employees.
But that follows decades of precedent, following President Richard Nixon’s resignation, that the White House keeps its distance from the Justice Department to preserve the independence of federal law enforcement.
Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer who founded a group that supports DOJ employees called Justice Connection, was similarly alarmed by the Schleifer firing.
“The White House firing career prosecutors for doing their jobs is likely unprecedented,” Young told NBC News. “It’s also the very weaponization this administration pretends to oppose.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration has targeted career prosecutors before, including firing individuals who served on special counsel Jack Smith’s team as well as assistant U.S. attorneys who worked on cases against Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But those personnel decisions were still routed through Trump appointees within the Justice Department, including by then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, as opposed to being handled by a White House official.
Schleifer, who was part of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Corporate and Securities Fraud Strike Force, had been working on a tax evasion case against Andy Wiederhorn, the former CEO and current chairman of Fat Brands, which owns Fatburger, Johnny Rockets and Twin Peaks. Then-U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, announcing the indictment last year, said that Wiederhorn had “treated the company as his personal slush fund, in violation of federal law.”
Public records show that Wiederhorn donated to Trump’s campaign, the Save America PAC and the Republican National Committee during the 2024 campaign cycle. Reached by NBC News, Wiederhorn’s attorney Douglas Fuchs declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Fat Brands also declined to comment.
Justice Department veterans worry that the ability of the White House to directly fire career prosecutors working on cases against Trump allies would have a chilling effect on the prosecution of white-collar crime.
“Who’s going to prosecute white-collar crime now?” the former federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California official said.
