Attorney General Letitia James of New York appears at an event with attorneys general from other states at Westchester Community College in Valhalla, N.Y., in May.
WASHINGTON >> The U.S. attorney investigating New York's attorney general, Letitia James, and former FBI Director James Comey said he had resigned Friday, hours after President Donald Trump called for his ouster.
Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation.
Trump has long viewed James and Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him.
Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.
"When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I'm concerned -- when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can't be any good," Trump said. The president did not mention that he nominated Siebert only after the two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, had already written Trump praising him.
When asked if he would fire Siebert, Trump responded, "Yeah, I want him out."
James, he told reporters, was "very guilty of something."
Trump later disputed that Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, "He didn't quit, I fired him!"
Trump's comments came after a high-stakes internal debate raged Friday over the fate of Siebert -- with Trump's own appointees at the Justice Department and key Republicans on Capitol Hill arguing to retain the veteran prosecutor.
The episode was consistent with Trump's threats to pursue the law enforcement officials who investigated him, an apparent challenge to the fundamental principle enshrined in the Justice Department's rulebook of investigating crimes rather than targeting out-of-favor individuals to uncover potential wrongdoing.
And though Trump provided a rationale for Siebert's ouster unrelated to the cases against James and Comey, the removal of a U.S. attorney who was investigating the president's foes showed how deeply the administration has departed from the long-standing norm of avoiding political interference in prosecutions in favor of using the justice system to seek retribution.
A lawyer for James, Abbe Lowell, called Siebert's removal "a brazen attack on the rule of law."
"The prosecutor did exactly what justice required by following the facts and the evidence, which didn't support charges against Attorney General James," he said. "Firing people until he finds someone who will bend the law to carry out his revenge has been President Trump's pattern -- and it's illegal."
A spokesperson for Siebert did not comment.
The ouster came after what appeared to be a last-ditch battle Friday by some in the Justice Department to protect Siebert. Several administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters, described an unsettled and confusing situation for much of the day, with Siebert and his top deputy still at their desks working.
It was not clear, even after Trump's comments, that they had been officially removed -- or if they were to be fired outright or offered other assignments in the Justice Department.
Siebert told a group of prosecutors Friday afternoon that he was considering resigning, and that Maya D. Song, the first assistant U.S. attorney in the office responsible for its operations, had been demoted to a job as a line prosecutor, according to two people familiar with the comments.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department, had privately defended Siebert against officials, including William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who had urged that he be fired and replaced with a prosecutor who would push the cases forward, according to a senior law enforcement official.
Pulte's power far outstrips his role as the head of an obscure housing agency. He has gained Trump's favor by pushing mortgage fraud allegations against perceived adversaries of the White House, including James; a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook; and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Pulte has made use of his influence and access to a president who prefers advisers who are willing to push boundaries. He had told Trump directly that he believed Siebert could be doing more, according to several officials with knowledge of the matter.
But Blanche, like Siebert, questioned the legal viability of bringing charges against James, according to current and former department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about internal discussions.
Siebert's office also recently hit a roadblock in its investigation of Comey on claims that he lied under oath.
Last week, prosecutors from Siebert's office subpoenaed Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University law professor and close friend and adviser to Comey, in connection with an investigation into whether the former director had lied about whether he authorized Richman to leak information to the news media, according to people familiar with the situation. Documents released by the FBI in August showed that investigators had examined possible disclosures of classified information to The New York Times.
Richman's statements to prosecutors were not helpful in their efforts to build a case against Comey, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The push to remove Siebert, a highly regarded career prosecutor who worked closely with Emil Bove, Trump's former enforcer in the department on immigration and gang cases, came as a shock in an office that handles some of the nation's most sensitive national security investigations. His possible termination was reported earlier by ABC News.
Siebert is well liked by many Trump administration officials and key congressional leaders, including Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The threat against Siebert was perhaps the most glaring example yet of the Trump administration's efforts to exercise direct control over personnel and policy decisions at U.S. attorney's offices around the country. Those moves have badly eroded the traditional distance between the White House and the Justice Department.
Administration officials have already used a series of arcane legal maneuvers in an effort to have Trump's nominees run federal prosecutors' offices in states including New Jersey and Delaware after their temporary terms ran out and despite the fact that federal judges in those districts have used their lawful powers to oppose the candidates.
A federal judge has found that those maneuvers are unconstitutional and that Trump's former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, has been in her position unlawfully since July.
Top political appointees in Trump's Justice Department have also stepped in to order the dismissal of high-profile matters like the bribery case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, overruling local prosecutors. Bondi personally intervened in a case in Utah in July, ordering local prosecutors to drop the charges against a doctor accused of selling fake COVID-19 vaccination cards.
James has been under threat since Trump returned to the White House. In the spring, his allies discovered a document related to a house in Virginia she bought with her niece, and believed they had struck gold.
On the document, she had said she planned to live in the house as a primary residence, an assertion flatly contradicted by other documents associated with the house. Pulte soon sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department highlighting that document along with other perceived misstatements related to James' housing records, and accused her of having committed mortgage fraud.
But James' exchanges with the lender showed her having communicated clearly that she did not plan to live in the house, and there was no indication that the single document on which she said otherwise was taken into account during the transaction. Her niece, her accountant and others involved in the transaction testified before a grand jury over the summer, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Siebert, a former Washington, D.C., police officer, worked his way up through the ranks at the U.S. attorney's office over the past 15 years. He has handled a broad range of cases including international drug and firearms trafficking, white-collar crime, child sexual exploitation, public corruption and immigration.
He has been particularly active on immigrant gang cases during the Trump administration and often spoke about his solid working relationship with Bove, who while at the department oversaw a wave of firings and forced retirements, according to officials.
Beginning in 2019, he was the deputy criminal supervisor in the Richmond, Virginia, division of the U.S. attorney's office. He became the interim U.S. attorney of Eastern Virginia in January, and in May the federal judges in the district unanimously chose to keep him in the role.