The lawyer took the elevator 32 floors to the U.S. attorney’s office, where for eight years he had worked as a highly regarded prosecutor. He had a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies to share and some thoughts to keep to himself.

“You have to be polite,” the lawyer, Michael Gordon, explained as the elevator rose. “But I don’t want to minimize it, or make it seem like everything’s OK. It’s not.”

Mr. Gordon was heading up on this steaming late July day in Tampa, Fla., to collect his things and say goodbye. Three weeks earlier, and just two days after receiving yet another outstanding performance review, he had been interviewing a witness online when a grim-faced colleague interrupted to hand him a letter. It said he was being “removed from federal service effective immediately” — as in, now.

Although the brief letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, provided no justification, Mr. Gordon knew the likely reason: Jan. 6, 2021.

He was being fired for successfully prosecuting people who had stormed the United States Capitol that day — assaulting police officers, vandalizing a national landmark and disrupting that sacrosanct moment in a democracy, the transfer of presidential power.

He was being fired for doing his job.

The letter did more than inform Mr. Gordon, a 47-year-old father of two, that he was unemployed. It confirmed for him his view that the Justice Department he had been honored to work for was now helping to whitewash a traumatic event in American history, supporting President Trump’s reframing of its violence as patriotic — and those who had prosecuted rioters in the name of justice as villains, perhaps even traitors.

In the seven months since Mr. Trump, newly returned to the White House, granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged in the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history, his administration has turned the agency upside down.

By tradition, the department long steered clear of White House intervention. Now, to remedy what the president has deemed the past weaponization of Justice, it has been deployed as a weapon for his score-settling and political crusades. To that end, it has sought to investigate and perhaps prosecute those who once investigated and prosecuted Mr. Trump and his allies, from the former special counsel, Jack Smith, to New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, to former President Barack Obama.

The template for that transformation was Jan. 6 — the pardons and then the purge.

To date, the Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen prosecutors who were assigned to hold the rioters accountable — roughly a quarter of the complement. Some were junior prosecutors, like Sara Levine, who had secured a guilty plea from a rioter who had grabbed a police officer. Others were veterans, including Greg Rosen, who had led the department’s Jan. 6 task force. Scores more prosecutors, involved in these and other cases, have left, either in fear of where the ax might next fall or out of sheer disgust.

The Justice Department declined to comment for this article, but a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, described the agency during the Biden administration as “a cabal of anti-Trump sycophants” engaged in a “relentless pursuit to throw the book at President Trump and his allies.” By “uprooting the foot soldiers,” Mr. Fields added, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Ms. Bondi, “is restoring the integrity of the department.”

And so Mr. Gordon. As the elevator climbed, he braced himself. In an interview the day before, he had talked about what had happened to him and many of his colleagues from the Justice Department’s once-vital and now-defunct Capitol Siege Section. Disbelief colored his every word.

“When you stand up in court and say, ‘Mike Gordon for the United States,’ you don’t say, ‘Mike Gordon for Donald Trump,’” he had said, adding: “I’m standing up there, and I’m speaking for the government. For all the people of the country.”

The elevator doors opened to his new reality. He was required to empty his pockets — “Keys, phones, wallets,” the security guard said — and, once through the metal detector, affix a scarlet sticker to his dress shirt.

“Visitor,” it said. “Escort Required.”

A Historic Investigation

As he watched the Jan. 6 attack unfold on the television in his home office, Mr. Gordon recalled what a mentor had told him when he’d joined the Justice Department in 2017.

“You’ve probably seen things happen, bad things, and thought to yourself, ‘Somebody should do something about that,’” he remembered her saying. “That’s now you. You are that somebody.”

It was an inspiring message for someone who had taken a circuitous route to the law. He had taught high school history and humanities for several years before deciding to attend law school. An internship at the Queens district attorney’s office in New York sealed the deal. Now here he was, a federal prosecutor in Tampa, handling violent crime and narcotics cases — and he could be one of the somebodies who did something.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington was soon asking for help with the ever-growing Jan. 6 caseload. Many prosecutors around the country raised a hand, including Mr. Gordon, who was detached in the fall of 2021 to work with the newly formed Capitol Siege Section.

The section was a managerial wonder, built on the fly in the crucible of crisis. Its founding chief was Michelle Zamarin, a longtime prosecutor and supervisor, who was eventually succeeded by one of her deputies, Mr. Rosen. Their shared challenge: transforming a Matterhorn of evidence into hundreds of viable cases.

The section seized hundreds of rioters’ cellphones, collected thousands of hours of body-camera and surveillance footage, amassed tens of thousands of social media posts and received hundreds of thousands of tips.

Beyond the daunting task of organizing all this into a searchable database, the prosecutors also faced the legal challenges filed by the defendants. Trying to move the Jan. 6 trials away from the perceived liberal bias of Washington. Leveling charges of political motivation. Portraying police officers who defended the Capitol as the actual aggressors. Accusing the federal government of entrapping the rioters into storming the building to discredit Mr. Trump and his supporters.

Those legal efforts, argued before federal judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, consistently failed, while the constant replaying of video from Jan. 6 seared the Capitol riot into the collective memory of the country and, especially, the prosecutors overseeing the cases. Mr. Rosen recalled three moments that crystallized that day in his mind:

• A security officer instructing members of Congress to remove anything identifying them as elected officials by shouting: "Pins off! Pins off!"

• Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges screaming in pain as rioters trying to breach the Capitol crushed him in the doorway at the Lower West Terrace. (“Very difficult to listen to," said Mr. Rosen, who described the officer's actions as heroic.)

• Metropolitan Police Commander Ramey Kyle, at the same Lower West Terrace doorway, encouraging other officers at the barricades by shouting, "We are not losing the Capitol today!” (A defiant defense of democracy, Mr. Rosen said. “A battle cry.”)

Mr. Rosen, Mr. Gordon and other former prosecutors in the Capitol Siege Section emphasize repeatedly that ideology played no role in their jobs. They were civil servants, not political appointees, dedicated to representing the United States in court.

Mike Romano, who had been working on public integrity cases, joined the section for reasons that echoed the “somebody should do something” thoughts of Mr. Gordon.

“If we are talking about a group of people who are trying to stop the democratic process and force the installation of their preferred candidate, that is a coup against democracy, right?” said Mr. Romano, who eventually became a deputy chief. “So it should be fulsomely investigated and prosecuted, and I wanted to be a part of that effort.”

Carmen Hernandez, a lawyer who represented about 20 Jan. 6 rioters, agreed that the attack on the Capitol was a uniquely violent event. But she maintained that prosecutors were often overly aggressive.

“Ninety percent of the cases were overcharged,” she said.

By late 2024, between 80 and 100 prosecutors had helped to handle the vast Jan. 6 docket. There were only two full acquittals in the cases they took to trial, meaning that hundreds of rioters were eventually convicted and hundreds more pleaded guilty — including people who had broken windows, vandalized offices and assaulted police officers, dragging them down stone steps, spraying them with irritants, beating them with poles.

Within the Justice Department, the accomplishments of the Capitol Siege Section were widely applauded, with Mr. Rosen repeatedly honored for his work. That August he received the Director’s Award, one of only three given departmentwide each year, for “superior performance in a managerial or supervisory role.”

Less than three months later, Donald J. Trump was re-elected president. The kinetic force behind the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump had used the riot as a campaign talking point, calling it a day of love, embracing far-fetched conspiracy theories to deflect blame, recording a song with a choir of imprisoned Jan. 6 defendants — and talking about wholesale pardons for convicted rioters.

The Capitol Siege prosecutors knew what was coming: payback.

Mass Clemency, and a Culling

At one point in the movie “The Princess Bride,” the hero recalls what the Dread Pirate Roberts would tell him each night while holding him captive: “Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

That is how Ms. Levine, a prosecutor in the Capitol Siege Section, described the fraught 11-week period between Election Day and Inauguration Day. Her uncertain future hung over her head like a pirate’s saber.

Her supervisor, Mr. Rosen, and others in the U.S. attorney’s office initially thought that even with the Justice Department under Mr. Trump’s control, they could convince the new leadership of the merits of prosecuting the most egregious Jan. 6 cases still pending. They also reasoned that Mr. Trump’s promise of pardons could not possibly extend to those convicted of violence, including assaults against police officers.

They imagined some kind of process, Mr. Rosen said. “We thought we had a runway to close this chapter of legal history.”

They were wrong.

“I don’t think any of us were remotely prepared for how sweeping those pardons were, and how indiscriminate they were,” he added.

Among those granted clemency were:

• Mark Ponder, who was prosecuted by Mr. Romano and sentenced to more than five years in prison for repeatedly attacking officers with wooden poles.

• Benjamen Burlew, who was prosecuted by Ms. Levine and pleaded guilty to grabbing an officer and trying to drag him into a crowd of rioters.

• Richard Barnett, who, in a case overseen by Mr. Gordon, was sentenced to more than four years in prison after being convicted of taking a stun gun to the Capitol and propping his feet on a desk in the office of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

• Steven Cappuccio, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for tearing off the gas mask of Officer Hodges and hitting him in the face with his own baton — one of the scenes from Jan. 6 that Mr. Rosen said he would never forget.

And after the pardons came the purge.

The president named Ed Martin as the top federal prosecutor in Washington. An advocate for the rioters, Mr. Martin had himself been in the crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, and his appointment created a fox-in-the-henhouse dynamic. He promptly dismissed the charges against all Jan. 6 defendants who had not been pardoned outright and opened an investigation into the use of an obstruction charge against many of the rioters

The Trump administration immediately targeted Justice Department employees who had been involved in any of the myriad investigations involving the president, including Jan. 6. It broke with protocol by reaching deep into the agency’s rank-and-file to fire or demote career lawyers for reasons rooted not in professional performance but, apparently, in political revenge.

One week after Inauguration Day, more than a dozen prosecutors were abruptly fired. The common thread: All had helped the special counsel, Mr. Smith, pursue two criminal cases against Mr. Trump — one examining his role in the efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, the other his mishandling of classified documents. Their dismissal letters claimed they could no longer be trusted to “faithfully implement” the president’s agenda.

Four days later, about 15 junior prosecutors who had worked on Jan. 6 cases, including Ms. Levine, were also fired. Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Emil Bove III, handpicked to help remold the Justice Department to the president’s liking, informed the fired lawyers that their employment “hindered” Mr. Martin from fulfilling his “obligation to faithfully implement the agenda that the American people elected President Trump to execute.” (Mr. Trump has since appointed Mr. Bove to a lifetime seat as a federal appeals court judge.)

On the evening she was fired, Ms. Levine joined co-workers for a drink in a basement whiskey bar on H Street, the air thick with gallows humor. They paused from consoling one another to watch their just-fired colleague Sean Brennan being interviewed on television by Rachel Maddow.

Mr. Brennan channeled the feelings of his former co-workers in that whiskey bar. “I think it’s a tough night,” he said. “But all of us who have spent the past year or more prosecuting these cases wouldn’t change a thing, and have no regrets.”

‘Weaponization of the Government’

Mr. Rosen was rattled by the firing of the junior prosecutors under his supervision, especially by what he called the “Orwellian language” being used to justify the action. But he resolved to keep his head down and do his job, even when his new boss, Mr. Martin, ordered him and his colleagues to start dismissing any Jan. 6 cases that had not been addressed through the sweep of pardons.

“I dismantled the thing, the very thing I created,” he said.

Then came Friday, Feb. 28, and wholesale humiliation. Experienced prosecutors who had worked on marquee Jan. 6 cases — including those of far-right extremists charged with sedition — were transferred from senior positions to low-level jobs. Along with them went those who had pursued indictments against Trump advisers like Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro.

Among the demoted was the Capital Siege Section’s leader, Mr. Rosen.

He received an email from Mr. Martin informing him that he was being reassigned “at once” to a menial job at the Early Case Assessment Section, deciding which of the overnight police reports to recommend for prosecution. The email, simultaneously sent to several other targeted prosecutors, added that “the change is not temporary.”

Federal prosecutors took particular note of the email’s timing — a measure of the suspicions now festering within the Justice Department. The message from Mr. Martin, a conservative Catholic who often posts Biblical passages on social media, came precisely at 9:05 in the morning, a moment that some prosecutors thought was intended to evoke Psalm 9:5: “You have rebuked the nations, you have destroyed the wicked; / you have blotted out their name forever and ever.”

Mr. Martin did not respond to a request for comment.

In the span of just a month, Mr. Rosen had gone from running the department’s largest-ever criminal investigation to doing the entry-level work of a freshman prosecutor. Some dark humor followed, with his wife joking that he couldn’t even get fired the right way.

Still, he said, the moment “made me realize the level of vindictiveness at play, coupled with the disregard for the institutional knowledge of our office.”

One of Mr. Rosen’s deputies, Mr. Romano, resigned in March after Mr. Martin tried to demote him as well. The Justice Department he had known, Mr. Romano said, was now signaling that it would be “responsive to the demands of the client, and the client here is no longer the United States government, but is this man.”

A few months later, in May, Mr. Rosen also quit — just as Mr. Martin was reassigned to oversee a Justice Department task force newly created to go after Mr. Trump’s enemies. Among the deputies he hired was a Jan. 6 rioter who had urged the mob that day to kill police officers protecting the Capitol.

Mr. Rosen’s resignation ended a decade of public service, the impetus for which had been planted during his adolescence, when his father, an agent for the Internal Revenue Service, took him to ground zero not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The news of Mr. Rosen’s resignation was shared on social media, where it elicited comments both positive and vile. “Some of the most despicable things one could read,” he recalled. “Including — aha! — they figured out that Greg Rosen, ‘Rosen’ underscored, is Jewish.”

And the firings have only expanded in scope.

The Justice Department’s pardon attorney would soon be dismissed after refusing to recommend that Mel Gibson, the actor and prominent Trump supporter, should have his gun rights restored. Another prosecutor was fired while in the midst of overseeing a fraud case against a restaurant-chain executive and prominent Trump donor.

Even several members of Mr. Smith’s support staff, who did little more than keep his team’s financial and administrative records, were let go, as was a longtime spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. Her connection to the Capitol attack: writing news releases about Jan. 6-related cases.

A similar culling has taken place inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Several agents who worked on Trump-related cases, including Jan. 6, have been fired — among them, five in early August. In a letter dismissing one of them, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, wrote that the agent had “exercised poor judgment and a lack of impartiality” in carrying out what he described as “the weaponization of the government.”

In this new, inverted reality, the Capitol rioters in particular have felt emboldened by their presidential clemency to lash out at prosecutors, demand restitution — even sue.

For example, four members of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist militant organization, were convicted of sedition but then granted clemency. Now they and another member have sued the government for $100 million, claiming they were subjected to “political persecution” for being “allies of President Trump.”

High Marks, and a Pink Slip

On Monday, June 23, the U.S. attorney’s office in Tampa trumpeted an indictment in a high-profile case largely put together by Mr. Gordon. Two men had been charged in connection with a fraud scheme involving the theft of more than $100 million from a nonprofit that managed funds for people with profound disabilities.

On Wednesday, June 25, Mr. Gordon received his midyear performance review: outstanding.

And on Friday, June 27, he was in his office, conducting a late-afternoon interview with a witness online, when a clearly upset co-worker opened the door and apologized for being the bearer of bad news. He then handed the prosecutor the one-page letter informing him that he’d been fired.

“No reason given, no explanation,” Mr. Gordon recalled. “Nothing.”

The co-worker explained that he had just been called by the Justice Department’s executive office in Washington and ordered to take Mr. Gordon’s devices and escort him from the building. He said he was instructed not to tell any of the managers in the department’s Tampa office, including its U.S. attorney, Gregory W. Kehoe.

“I think they didn’t want anybody telling them they shouldn’t,” Mr. Gordon said.

He returned to his online session with a witness, which he had muted. “I have to end this interview immediately,” he said he told the witness. “I can’t tell you why.”

When he started speaking soon after about his firing, publicly and angrily, the blowback was immediate and threatening. Rioters and their allies posted online messages demanding that his punishment for zealously prosecuting Jan. 6 cases extend beyond the loss of his job.

“Throw him in jail!” one person wrote.

Now, on that stifling July day in Tampa, Mr. Gordon was returning to collect his belongings.

He affixed the visitor’s badge to his shirt and disappeared into the warren of his old office. In a couple of days he would sue the federal government, claiming that his firing violated civil service protections and was retribution for going after Trump supporters who had rioted on Jan. 6.

He found a cart and began to dismantle an office that was just as he had left it, his desk a still life of law enforcement interrupted. Legal pads filled with handwritten notes. Manila folders placed beside computer monitors. Binders of color-coded documents. An outbox, empty, and an inbox, full.

Mr. Gordon boxed up his stuff: the family photographs and the framed diplomas and the five championship pennants for his hometown San Antonio Spurs. Then he wheeled a cart weighed down with the remnants of his federal career toward the elevator bank.

Moments later, he guided the cart through the underground garage to his red Ford. His belongings fit neatly in the trunk. The container with a few remaining cookies went to the front seat.

Then the former prosecutor, somehow both outstanding and disposable, drove away from a vital government agency he no longer recognized.

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.