They said the attorney general provided ‘no cause … or required due process … with respect to their termination and removal.’
Three former Department of Justice (DOJ) officials have filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Pam Bondi and the federal government, alleging that they were terminated due to their work on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach.
In their complaint filed on Thursday, Michael Gordon, Patricia Hartman, and Joseph Tirrell alleged that their terminations violated federal law and longstanding precedents that they say are meant to protect civil servants.
Tirrell, who confirmed his firing in a social media post earlier this month, had served as the top-level DOJ ethics official. Meanwhile, Gordon was the assistant U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida, and Hartman was a public affairs specialist in the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, according to the court filing.
According to their complaint, Bondi provided “no cause, let alone a proper merit-based one, or required due process was provided to Plaintiffs with respect to their termination and removal.” Bondi informed them of their removal in one-page letters that were issued by her, they said.
The filing said that both Gordon and Hartman were involved in cases involving individuals who were charged in the aftermath of the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people who were convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 cases.
The plaintiffs further alleged that their firings disregarded what they termed as “long-standing statutory and regulatory protections that govern how and when members of the civil service can be terminated, and the limits thereof.”
“The Attorney General does not have absolute authority to simply remove DOJ employees,” the complaint states. “Specifically, there are crucial guardrails that protect employees from arbitrary or unlawful termination.”
While the three plaintiffs would normally go to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) to appeal their terminations, the lawsuit argued that “because of the government’s own actions, any complaint filed before the MSPB will be futile” and alleged that “the MSPB currently cannot function as intended.”
