These fired DOJ lawyers are finding new ways to make a difference

Inside a sunny conference room across the river from Washington, D.C., Monika Isia Jasiewicz described her unlikely path this year.

It started when she received an invitation to the inauguration from her Yale Law School classmate JD Vance.

Less than two weeks later, she and more than a dozen other government lawyers who prosecuted people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, received another message from the new Trump administration. They were fired — by email.

“It feels surreal to see my peers be in the leadership of this country and to experience you know, us as civil servants, being cast aside,” Jasiewicz said.

She and three more women who left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington this year have found their way back to public service — working together, again, as prosecutors in Arlington County, Va., not far from the District.

The small group of assistant commonwealth attorneys meets for lunch most days in the shadow of the local courthouse, bonded by the trauma of losing jobs they loved.

Carolyn Jackson, another member of the group, said she had several prosecutions of Capitol rioters in progress at the time of the inauguration. Those cases all vanished after the president granted clemency to every Jan. 6 defendant on his first day in office.

“We can do good here,” Jackson said. “And I think everybody, we can get through some dark times and some scary times if everybody focuses on doing the good that they can.”

A terrible time to look for a legal job

The prosecutors who had been dismissed had started work on Jan. 6 cases on Sept. 11, 2023, as the Justice Department hired a wave of young attorneys to help carry out one of the largest and most complex criminal investigations in American history.

Shortly before the Biden administration came to a close, DOJ officials moved to place those lawyers into prosecution jobs based in Washington’s municipal court, where the bulk of street crimes are brought to justice.

But the new leaders in the Trump Justice Department rejected that approach and terminated them all. Because they were considered probationary lawyers, they had fewer job protections.

The White House says the president has enormous power over the federal workforce — and can fire people under his broad authority.

The probationary lawyers who exited DOJ entered a job market that may have been uniquely terrible.

In February, President Trump began to slap executive orders on big law firms that hired people who had investigated him. Those orders barred attorneys from federal buildings, yanked their security clearances and threatened the firms’ clients.

Jasiewicz spent nine years at the prominent litigation firm Williams & Connolly before she went to work as a prosecutor. She once fended off weekly calls from recruiters. But by February, she said, she could not even get a meeting. All the big firms felt scared of possible retribution from Trump, headhunters told her, because she was associated with the Jan. 6 prosecutions.

The night Sara Levine had been terminated, she worked her phone, calling a former boss. “I reached out and said, ‘Hey, I don’t suppose you have any positions open?'” Levine recalled.

On the other end of the line was Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, the elected, Democratic commonwealth attorney in Arlington, Va. She said she would be glad to welcome Levine back to the office. And she had a few more openings too.

“These are people who are at the top of their field,” Dehghani-Tafti said. “These are people who care about public service. Our whole job as prosecutors is to do justice and to do it without fear or favor and in my mind there’s no better example of people who were doing that than the people who were working in the Capitol siege division.”

Levine, Jackson and Jasiewicz now handle cases that run the gamut from shoplifting at a local mall to malicious woundings.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, new U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has been recruiting for new prosecutors to replenish the ranks in her office. Recently, Pirro brought in 20 lawyers from the military’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps to fill critical vacancies in the municipal court.

“We were looking at each other thinking, 15 of us just got fired when we had finished training for that exact job,” said Carolyn Jackson. “You know, you didn’t have to bring in JAG officers to do the job that we were ready, willing and able to do.”

Jennifer Blackwell spent 20 years at the Justice Department, rising to the level of deputy chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in the District. She said watching the fired Jan. 6 prosecutors leave the office was among the hardest days of her career.

“I have viewed it as my job as a manager not only to protect the ethics and integrity of the office but also to protect those that are under my supervision, and not being able to protect them from what was ultimately coming … was really traumatizing,” Blackwell said.

Blackwell said she no longer recognized the Justice Department and reluctantly concluded she had to leave. She’s glad to be working in Arlington, alongside her former colleagues.

“It is my hope that we will be back someday to fight the good fight,” Blackwell said. “And I truly believe that day will come, but that it is not now.”