It was late afternoon on the last Friday in June, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Gordon was in his office in Tampa, Florida, interviewing a victim for an upcoming trial via Zoom.
Alongside a special agent, Gordon was preparing the victim to be a witness in a Justice Department case against a lawyer the Justice Department alleged had been scamming clients.
There was a knock at the door, Gordon later told NBC News, and he didn’t answer; at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Florida, there was a culture of not just popping in when the door is closed. But the door popped open, and there stood the office manager, ashen-faced.
The office manager is in charge of security, and Gordon thought for a moment that something might have happened to his family. Gordon muted the Zoom call, and the office manager handed him a piece of paper.
It was a one-page letter signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi. He’d been terminated from federal service.
“No explanation. No advance warning. No description of what the cause was,” Gordon said in an interview. “Now, I knew why. I knew it had to be my Jan. 6 work.”
Gordon had been senior trial counsel in the Capitol Siege Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, which prosecuted alleged rioters involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. His title reflected some of the high-profile cases he’d taken on during the Jan. 6 investigation and the role he played in helping other federal prosecutors.
At the time of his firing, Gordon had long been working on other cases back home in Florida. He had recently been assigned to co-lead a case against two people accused of stealing more than $100 million from a medical trust for people with disabilities, as well as injured workers and retirees. Just two days before he was fired, he’d received an “outstanding” rating on his performance review.
Now, along with two other recently fired Justice Department employees, Gordon is pushing back, suing the Trump administration late yesterday over their dismissals. The suit argues that the normal procedures federal employees are expected to go through to address their grievances — the Merit Systems Protection Board — are fundamentally broken because of the Trump administration’s actions.
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