President Donald Trump triggered outrage for forcing out his own hand-picked federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia for failing to find the evidence to bring criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey. And a New York Times report on Tuesday revealed his federal prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia was forced out under similar circumstances.
The prosecutor, Todd Gilbert, was forced to resign over the summer, sparking extensive speculation and alarm.
"Senior Justice Department officials had ordered Mr. Gilbert to open a grand jury investigation into whether anyone at F.B.I. headquarters during and after the Biden administration had mishandled classified documents related to the Russia investigation that Mr. Trump has long decried as a 'witch hunt' against him," said the report. "The new details highlight how Mr. Trump’s push for criminal prosecutions of those he sees as enemies has led to crises inside multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices, in this instance dooming a top prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia, based in Roanoke."
"There have been a number of unusual facets to the investigation," the report noted. "The Justice Department tends to try to closely control national security-related investigations in a particular office or team. In this instance, however, the department has dedicated multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices to a set of interconnected issues, all centered on an effort to show misconduct in the Russia investigation, which is nearly a decade old."
According to the report, "After reviewing the evidence, Mr. Gilbert told his superiors that he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to justify a grand jury investigation, these people said. Frustrated by that answer, aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, blamed a senior career attorney in the office who they believed had swayed Mr. Gilbert: Zachary Lee, a veteran prosecutor with more than two decades of experience involving public corruption and narcotics, among other issues." Trump officials then tried to push Gilbert to remove Lee, and he refused, after which he was forced out.
Gilbert, the former Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, has separately been in the news after Democratic Virginia Attorney General nominee Jay Jones was found to have privately posted violent texts about him several years ago.
