A 17-year former Justice Department official is warning of a wave of retribution inside the agency.
Patty Hartman, who served as a top public affairs specialist at the FBI and federal prosecutors’ offices, told CBS News, “The rules don’t exist anymore.”
Hartman, who was fired Monday via a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi, is the fourth person connected to the agency’s work on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots to be terminated in the past month.
“There used to be a line, used to be a very distinct separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, because one should not interfere with the work of the other,” Hartman told CBS News. “That line is very definitely gone.”
Hartman isn’t a prosecutor, but worked on the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney’s Office public affairs team that distributed news releases about the more than 1,500 Jan. 6 criminal prosecutions.
“I am not political. I do not serve a president or a party,” she said. “I serve the American people, the Department of Justice and its mission and the citizens in the district where I work. I’ve been doing that for almost 20 years.”
The purge of Justice Department employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases began shortly after President Trump’s second inauguration, when he installed a former Jan. 6 defense attorney, Ed Martin, as the acting top prosecutor in Washington, D.C.
Multiple prosecutors were promptly terminated.
The latest wave of firings included Hartman and three more prosecutors who helped handle some of the Jan. 6 cases. She said those firings appear to be a form of retribution from the administration.
Mr. Trump and his supporters have downplayed the damage, injuries and trauma of the Capitol siege and have sought to recast convicted rioters as “political prisoners.”
The mass pardon of nearly all of the approximately 1,500 defendants shuttered the prosecutions in January.
Hartman said her firing Monday took her by surprise. Her computer appeared to power itself down while she was in the middle of working on a press release, she said, and then an agency official handed a termination letter bearing Attorney General Pam Bondi’s signature.
She characterized her dismissal as an indication of a broader destabilization inside the Justice Department and Trump administration. In a social media post this week, she wrote, “We appear to be driving straight into an abyss that holds no memory of what democracy is, was, or should be.”
“The people in charge who are supposed to protect us — our fellow Americans who we elected, along with those who were appointed, and swore an oath to protect this nation and our Constitution — now use the Constitution as a weapon to suit their own ends. And the most terrifying fact is, their road map is very long,” Hartman also wrote.
She told CBS News she had been fired without due process and said she’s considering a legal challenge over her termination.
Hartman said the administration has “just thrown all of the rules out the window, like we are falling into a crevasse or an abyss, and I really, truly hope that the country can pull out of it.”
One of Hartman’s colleagues, who asked for anonymity to avoid incurring retaliation for speaking publicly, told CBS News, “Patty’s firing really pisses me off. It’s so unconscionably petty and vindictive. Who is the constituency for firing Patty? Even the most rabid Jan. 6 apologists weren’t calling for the firing of the woman who wrote the press releases.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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