In a decisive move to restore integrity to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Trump administration fired 20 employees who had worked with disgraced special counsel Jack Smith on his politically motivated investigations targeting President Donald Trump. According to a source familiar with the matter, the terminated staff included two prosecutors, 12 support staff, and six U.S. marshals who had assisted in the sham classified documents and 2020 election cases—both of which were rightfully dismissed after Trump’s triumphant return to the White House. This purge follows the earlier dismissal of more than a dozen Smith allies in January, while Smith himself resigned before facing accountability under the new administration.
The liberal media, ever eager to spin this as an authoritarian crackdown, has predictably framed these firings as an attack on the so-called “rule of law.” But the truth is far simpler: the DOJ is finally being cleansed of partisan operatives who weaponized the justice system against a sitting president. Axios and Reuters, despite their left-wing bias, begrudgingly confirmed the terminations, though they omitted the critical context—that Smith’s investigations were nothing more than an extension of the Deep State’s years-long conspiracy to destroy Trump.
Among those dismissed was Joseph Tirrell, former director of the DOJ’s Departmental Ethics Office, who took to LinkedIn to whine about his termination by Attorney General Pam Bondi. In a self-righteous post, Tirrell lamented, “Until Friday evening, I was the senior ethics attorney at the Department of Justice responsible for advising the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General directly on federal employee ethics.” Yet his sudden concern for ethics rings hollow, given his role in an administration that relentlessly targeted Trump on flimsy, politically charged grounds.
Similarly, Patty Hartman, a public affairs staffer in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office during the January 6 prosecutions, was shown the door. Hartman melodramatically told CBS News, “There used to be a line, a very distinct separation between the White House and the Department of Justice… That line is very definitely gone.” What she fails to acknowledge is that this “line” was obliterated long ago—not by Trump, but by the Obama-Biden DOJ, which spied on his campaign, and later by Smith’s team, which rushed sham indictments in a desperate attempt to sway the 2024 election.
Even Smith’s final report inadvertently exposed the weakness of his own case. He admitted that Trump would have been convicted only if he hadn’t won the election—a stunning admission of the political nature of the prosecution. Worse, Smith conceded he lacked evidence to charge Trump with insurrection, tacitly acknowledging that January 6 was not an orchestrated coup but a riot exploited by the Left to smear Trump and his supporters.
The liberal media, of course, won’t highlight these facts. Instead, they’ll clutch their pearls over the “purge” of Deep State loyalists while ignoring the real scandal: that these officials abused their power for years in service of a political vendetta. President Trump’s decisive actions are not an overreach—they’re a necessary correction to restore a justice system that had been hijacked by partisan activists.