President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office one year ago, promising to clean house at the Justice Department and the FBI. But the administration’s personnel overhaul is under scrutiny for a series of questionable holdovers.
Although data reveals a significant level of overall turnover across the DOJ since last year, a series of key career prosecutors and FBI officials tied to controversial investigations during former President Joe Biden‘s tenure remain employed by the department.
At DOJ, Jocelyn Ballantine, a longtime prosecutor who worked on several Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants’ cases, including those involving seditious conspiracy allegations surrounding the Proud Boys, was recently assigned as lead prosecutor in the Jan. 6 pipe bomber case. Critics have accused Ballantine of employing coercive plea tactics in earlier Jan. 6 matters and for her involvement in the criminal case of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, making her a symbol for Trump allies concerned that the administration is not removing questionable career attorneys.
Speaking from the White House last month, Trump addressed Ballantine’s status when asked by a LindellTV reporter about her tenure at the department.
“Did the Pipe Bomber Act Alone?” – @POTUS Responds to Explosive Question from LindellTV
LindellTV’s @CaraCastronuova asked President Trump at a roundtable:
“What’s your gut instinct? Did the alleged J6 pipe bomber act alone? And why is the same DOJ prosecutor from the Proud… pic.twitter.com/zeO9D4SccL
— LindellTV (@RealLindellTV) December 8, 2025
“I really appreciate that question,” Trump said. “Jocelyn is being looked at. They all have to be looked at. What they’re doing is so bad. This was a whole Democrat hoax, the whole thing was a Democrat hoax. And it’s being looked at.” Despite the president’s comment, Ballantine continues to represent the Trump Justice Department in court.
Another holdover from previous administrations is Emily Miller, a 22-year veteran at the department who works in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, according to her LinkedIn account, and one who played a notable role in early Jan. 6 prosecutions.
Miller was in charge of leading efforts to collect evidence from the day of the riot, writing in court filings that “footage displays approximately 1,000 events that may be characterized as assaults on federal officers,” according to a Sept. 1, 2021 status report in the case of Couy Griffin, who was later found guilty for “trespassing,” though her never stepped foot inside the U.S. Capitol.
Despite Trump’s pardons of more than 1,500 defendants from the Jan. 6 riot prosecuted under former U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, who was succeeded by Trump’s nominee Jeanine Pirro, Miller remains at the department. Her continued tenure is just another example of career attorneys who handled Jan. 6-related cases who are still employed at the DOJ.
A similar pattern has emerged at U.S. attorneys’ offices outside Washington. In 2022, the FBI carried out a highly publicized raid on the home of Catholic anti-abortion activist Mark Houck, leading to federal FACE Act charges that he was later acquitted of at trial in January 2023. Conservatives widely criticized the prosecution as an example of selective enforcement.
All three prosecutors who handled Houck’s case — Anita Eve and Ashley Martin of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and Sanjay Patel of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division — appear to remain employed at the department, according to a review of Eve and Martin’s LinkedIn pages and calls to their EDPA office phone numbers, which indicates that they are active in the department. The Washington Examiner was unable to immediately locate a third-party career profile for Patel, though a DOJ press release from July listed him as a trial attorney.
Even lesser-known holdovers from the Biden administration remain at the DOJ in high-profile positions. Although they are less controversial, figures like Assistant Attorney General for Administration Jolene Ann Lauria at the Justice Management Division and Alicia Long, who remains the Principal Assistant United States under Pirro, have kept their positions without scrutiny.
Trump allies such as Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton pointed toward the data from the Office of Personnel Management, which, to him, exposed a much slimmer number of separations than he had expected from an administration that campaigned on fundamental change at the DOJ.
“The OPM numbers speak for themselves, and they are inconsistent with the serious reforms that are needed at the FBI,” Fitton told the Washington Examiner.
Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project, offered a similar assessment.
“The numbers should be a lot higher in terms of who’s fired,” Howell told the Washington Examiner. “And you look at those numbers, and it’s really underwhelming.”
Despite their complaints, OPM data shows the DOJ has seen record levels of turnover, ranking among the top seven federal agencies for total separations since January last year, with roughly 9,000 employees who either quit, retired, were part of a reduction in force, or whose appointments expired or were listed as “other separation.” To the department’s credit, the volume of separations represents the most removals in a single year over the past decade.
BREAKING: @FBI leadership fired no more than 138 employees (“other separations”) since January 20, 2025, according to official OPM data. Of the 3,063 FBI employees who left FBI employment since President Trump came back to office, most retired (872) or quit (980). The FBI has… pic.twitter.com/EcjN40KOxN
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) January 11, 2026
At the FBI, which employs about 35,300 people, there have been 3,063 separations since Trump returned to office. A closer analysis reveals that of those separations, 980 employees quit, 872 retired, and just 138 were classified as “other separations,” a category that includes firings and other involuntary removals.
Fitton suggested in a post on X that these figures are difficult to reconcile in light of the years of conservative voices levying allegations about politicized investigations and retaliation against whistleblowers.
Moreover, recent developments surrounding the FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation, which served as the pretext for the two federal indictments against Trump and involved the unprecedented surveillance of several Republican lawmakers’ phone records, have added to those concerns.
A November report by Reuters revealed the FBI initially fired four agents who worked on the team investigating Trump and his allies, which was later utilized by former special counsel Jack Smith to lay the groundwork for his 2020 election conspiracy case against Trump. However, the outlet noted that two of those terminations were later reversed.
Agents Blaire Toleman and David Geist were told they were being terminated, only to later be informed the decisions had been rescinded, according to several sources interviewed by the outlet. Tolman now works out of the Chicago Field Office, while Geist remains assigned to an FBI rapid-response unit.
Most notably, the walkback of Tolman and Geist’s firings also appears to undercut recent public claims by FBI Director Kash Patel, who told Trump via a Truth Social Post that the FBI had already rooted out the “corrupt actors” involved in Arctic Frost after Trump retorted on his platform, demanding swift action.
The original architect of Arctic Frost, former Washington Field Office official Timothy Thibault, left the FBI in 2022 after his anti-Trump social media posts became public.
Adding to the dissonance surrounding department firings is a recurring dispute over whether high-profile departures were firings or resignations. For example, Trump said in September that he fired Erik Siebert, the former head of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, under pressure to bring indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. But Siebert had also announced his voluntary resignation near-simultaneously.
A similar disagreement unfolded this month after five DOJ prosecutors departed from their roles rather than pursue an investigation against a Minneapolis protester in relation to a fatal ICE-related shooting. An initial report by the New York Times described the exits as resignations, while Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted she had fired them, according to Fox News.
In response to a request for comment, a DOJ spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that the past year of personnel shifts at the department has improved efficiency within the ranks, but declined to answer specific questions about the volume of formal firings versus voluntary resignations. A representative for the FBI did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
“After four years of bureaucratic weaponization under the Biden Administration, President Trump and Attorney General Bondi have created the most efficient Department of Justice in American history,” the DOJ spokesperson said.
It remains an open question whether some of these holdovers will survive the remainder of Trump’s term in office, though the department has already seen 794 separations since the start of this year, according to OPM data.
HOUSE GOP REVISITS BIDEN HANDLING OF JAN. 6 WITH NEW PANEL
Additionally, DOJ protocols strictly limit the government from making specific comments about personnel separations due to the risk of litigation, making the task of tracking direct firings even more opaque.
The department is currently defending itself in federal court against a lawsuit filed by Brian Driscoll Jr. and two other fired FBI leaders, which alleges political appointees like Bondi and Patel are taking directives from the White House to execute a mass purge of ranking officials to keep their jobs, underscoring the tight rope officials walk when publicly discussing personnel decisions.