Several senior career Justice Department officials have been told they are being removed from their jobs and reassigned to a new effort to take legal action against so-called sanctuary cities, four department officials familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Two of those reassigned, one senior DOJ official said, were George Toscas, who had been deputy assistant attorney general in the National Security Division, and Cory Amundson, who had been head of the Public Integrity Section.
“Everyone they don’t like is being dumped there,” one official said.
NBC News had previously reported that Toscas had been removed from his job. He played a key role in pushing to overcome resistance within the FBI to conducting the search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in August 2022.
It was not previously known that Amundson had been reassigned. The Public Integrity Section prosecutes political corruption and played a role in both cases again Trump.
A DOJ spokesman did not have an immediate comment.
As NBC News previously reported, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a memo to the workforce on Wednesday outlining a series of policy changes designed to get the department more involved in finding illegal immigrants and enforcing violations of immigration law.
This afternoon, the leader of the Justice Department’s gender equality effort — a career official in the civil rights division — sent an email saying she was resigning. A source familiar with the matter said she made the move after she learned the Office of Personnel Management is moving to shut down employee affinity groups, also known as employee resource groups, across the government. Those groups aim to provide employees with others of similar backgrounds to associate with.
The official, Stacey Young, had written an opinion piece on The New York Times earlier this month about the concerns of career employees.
“To stay in our jobs, we will need more than exhortation; we will need legal, psychological and other practical support,” she wrote. “One reason many federal employees are thinking of leaving government — often after decades of serving our country, under Republican and Democratic presidents — is that we’re afraid. The incoming leaders of the government have told us in aggressive terms that they want us either gone or miserable.”
Two Justice Department officials say the DOJ rescinded job offers made to dozens of people through the Attorney General’s Honors Program, a time-honored recruiting effort aimed at top law school graduates. Officials say that move was required as part of Trump’s order imposing a 90-day federal hiring freeze.
The DOJ also imposed a freeze on all action on civil rights cases, according to a separate memo obtained by NBC News.