'Legal cover': Trump ally reportedly scrambled to hide president's direct role in purge

President Donald Trump was personally behind the directive to fire career prosecutors who worked for special counsel Jack Smith on the criminal cases against him, The Guardian reported on Tuesday.

Smith handled the two federal cases prosecuting Trump — the election conspiracy plot and the illegal removal of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago country club.

Despite acting Attorney General James McHenry giving the formal order, reported Hugo Lowell, "The genesis for the firings was Trump himself, according to two people directly familiar with the matter, and a demonstration of Trump’s unchecked power as he implements a new order where the justice department is answerable to the White House.

"... Trump’s intervention to remove the prosecutors in Smith’s office was seen by some of his advisers as the start of their efforts to make it normal practice to have the attorney general work with the West Wing to enforce and enact its political agenda."

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Trump made Smith a major target of his attacks on the campaign trail, calling him "deranged" and accusing him of a political "witch hunt." He has never provided any evidence to substantiate the idea that the prosecutions were improper or politically motivated.

According to the report, "After Trump instructed his advisers that he wanted the prosecutors gone, the White House presidential personnel office, led by longtime Trump ally Sergio Gor, issued a memo that directed the justice department to proceed and gave the move a degree of legal cover" so that it would not appear the order came from Trump himself.

All of this comes at a moment when Trump and his allies, led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, are instituting a massive takeover of the federal civil service, including Musk's seizure and apparent recoding of the Treasury Department's payment system.