Federal prosecutors working on a public corruption investigation into Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, a top ally of President Donald Trump, abruptly withdrew from the inquiry this week.
The Context
The withdrawals were announced in a legal filing late Thursday, which was first reported by NewsChannel5 Nashville. They come as the Trump administration fires hundreds of civil servants, government watchdogs and career officials deemed insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump and enacts sweeping changes at the Justice Department and other federal agencies.
What To Know
Thursday's filing was signed by Robert McGuire, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee. It relates to an ongoing legal battle over the government's seizure of a cell phone belonging to Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles.
The U.S. "moves this Court to withdraw Assistant United States Attorneys Robert S. Levine and J. Christopher Suedekum as prosecutors and counsel of record on this matter," the filing says.
Ogles is a longtime Trump loyalist and made headlines earlier this month when he put forward a proposal to allow presidents to seek a third term in office.
He is also the subject of an FBI investigation into whether he violated campaign finance laws when he said in federal disclosures that he personally made a $320,000 loan to his campaign. The feds seized Ogles' cell phone last August as part of that investigation.
McGuire said in Thursday's filing that the investigation into the Tennessee congressman will now be led by John P. Taddei, a prosecutor in the DOJ's public integrity division. The head of that office, Corey Amundson, resigned this week to avoid a Trump administration directive ordering him to transfer to a sanctuary cities enforcement group within the Justice Department.
Newsweek reached out to Ogles' office, the DOJ and the White House for comment via email on Friday.
The Justice Department has undergone a series of sweeping personnel changes since Trump took office.
Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., fired roughly 30 federal prosecutors who worked on the department's sprawling investigation into the Capitol riot on Friday evening. The Washington Post first reported on the firings, citing two people familiar with the matter.
The Associated Press also reported earlier Friday that the Trump administration is moving to fire FBI agents who were involved in the investigations into Trump. It's unclear if those agents were included in the dismissals carried out by Martin's office.
Trump, who was charged with crimes related to the riot by the special counsel Jack Smith's office, has repeatedly denigrated the department's investigation into the January 6, 2021 events at the Capitol and said it was politically motivated.
Smith's office dropped its cases against Trump after he won the November election and the Justice Department fired several career lawyers involved in prosecuting Trump earlier this week.
What People Are Saying
Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director and frequent Trump critic, weighed in on the withdrawal of two prosecutors from the Ogles investigation, writing on X: "I'll say it again, we'll see corruption cases on friends of Trump dropped like hot rocks."
The FBI Agents Association said of the Trump administration's reported plan to fire agents involved in the Trump investigations: "Dismissing potentially hundreds of Agents would severely weaken the Bureau's ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the Bureau and its new leadership for failure."
What Happens Next
The president, as well as the billionaire Elon Musk, who heads up the Department of Government Efficiency, has pledged to dismiss a number of career civil servants as part of what they describe as an effort to trim the federal bureaucracy.
Trump signed a slew of executive actions to that end after taking office on January 20, but he's been met with significant resistance in the form of lawsuits brought by civil rights groups, immigrants' rights advocates and labor unions representing federal employees.
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