The Trump administration has reportedly reassigned more than a dozen career Justice Department officials, including one who played a central role in pushing for the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.
The new assignments – given to at least 15 longtime officials – will see the federal employees remain within DOJ but in the roles where they are expected to wield less influence on the department’s major decision, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Some officials were notified they were being transferred just hours after President Trump was sworn-in on Monday, according to the outlet.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General George Toscas, who has served in the DOJ’s national security division for nearly 20 years, is reportedly among the officials being moved.
Toscas was a key figure in the DOJ’s push for the August 2022 FBI raid of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, after the 45th president allegedly defied the National Archives’ repeated requests for White House documents from his first term in office.
Toscas fumed to FBI officials that he didn’t “give a damn about the optics” of an unprecedented raid of a former president’s home during a combative call between the DOJ and the bureau’s Washington Field Office ahead of the issuance of a warrant to search for the documents, court filings in former special counsel Jack Smith’s dismissed classified documents case against Trump show.
“You and your leadership seem to have gone from cautious to fearful,” Toscas reportedly wrote in an email to the former head of the FBI Washington Field Office, Steven D’Antuono, after the phone call, according to NBC News.
Toscas allegedly told D’Antuono, who had initially opposed the raid, that he was “way out of line on substance and form” for resisting the search of Trump’s residence.
Trump, 78, has argued that the raid and subsequent criminal cases brought against him are emblematic of the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the DOJ, which on the campaign trail he vowed to do away with if elected to a second term.
Toscas has reportedly been reassigned to the DOJ’s new Office of Sanctuary Cities Enforcement.
The transferred employees may opt to resign from DOJ altogether rather than take the new roles.
Some of Toscas’ former colleagues told the Washington Post that his experience as a counterintelligence attorney will be missed.
“He has seen everything in both counterterrorism and counterintelligence,” a former DOJ National Security Division employee anonymously told the outlet. “There is no one in the department who knows as much about prosecuting and investigating terrorists and spies as George Toscas.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
