Since January 2025, nearly a third of the federal prosecutors based in Pittsburgh have left their jobs, joining a national exodus under the Trump administration.
Pressured by increasingly heavy workloads linked to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, the waning independence of the Justice Department and disruptions at several high-profile offices, thousands of assistant U.S. attorneys have opted to walk.
The numbers tell the tale: more than 3,400 federal prosecutors gone last year, according to the government — about a quarter of the department’s lawyers.
Pittsburgh is hardly immune. At full capacity, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania has about 60 prosecutors. Among the 18 who have departed since Trump returned to office: heads of the criminal and civil divisions, the deputies of each of those divisions and long-time line prosecutors.
Of the four lawyers who prosecuted one of the most high-profile cases in district history — the 2023 trial of the man who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue building in Squirrel Hill — only one remains: Troy Rivetti, who is running the office on an interim basis.
“That’s an intellectual drain,” said Robert Cessar, the office’s former second-in-command, who retired in 2024 after 34 years.
Robert Cindrich, a retired federal judge who was the government’s top prosecutor in Pittsburgh from 1978-1981, notes that in one respect, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is no different from any other workplace.
“There’s always going to be attrition,” Cindrich said.
But this, according to observers, is different.
“Trump’s Justice Department has focused on different priorities and ones that are at odds with what the Justice Department traditionally embraced,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in criminal law and ethics.
“The distortion of that with the president’s own agenda is really at odds with their sense of personal identity and professional pride. That can really demoralize the rank and file in that sense and cause a lot of people to leave.”
The White House referred questions to the Department of Justice, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Former Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys in Pennsylvania under the first Trump administration, including Scott Brady in the Western District, William McSwain in the Eastern District and Dave Freed in the Middle District, did not respond to requests for comment.
Former Republican U.S. Attorney and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett declined to comment.
Messages left with five members of the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys — past or present officers and new members, including both Democrats and Republicans — were not returned.
‘Crushing morale’
One of the biggest challenges facing the Pittsburgh office, former prosecutors said, is the dramatic increase in the number of immigration petitions being filed in the Western District of Pennsylvania, which includes 25 counties from Erie to Johnstown.
Since Jan. 1, more than 500 petitions have been filed by people being detained at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Central Pennsylvania by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The number of filings has so overwhelmed federal court that Chief U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon in January assigned additional judges from the Pittsburgh division to preside over the cases, which were typically heard by the Johnstown division.
Jim Wilson spent nearly 35 years in Pittsburgh’s U.S. Attorney’s Office as a line prosecutor prior to his retirement in September 2024. He said the immigration petitions are “crushing morale.”
“They’re coming in all day every day, and they’re dominating everyone’s calendar,” Wilson said, citing conversations with former colleagues.
The sheer volume of the petitions, previously handled by the office’s civil litigators, has led to them being doled out to attorneys in all divisions.
“The (immigration petition) work takes away from the criminal cases,” Cessar said.
Michael Rick, a spokesman for the office, declined to answer questions about the petitions.
‘Torn limb from limb’
In Pittsburgh, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has long maintained a stellar reputation, Cindrich said.
But Wilson said the standing enjoyed by federal prosecutors across the country is starting to diminish.
“Decades and decades of goodwill, literally from the founding of the republic, have now been forfeited,” Wilson said.
In the past, he said, federal judges would trust the word of a Justice Department attorney. In some jurisdictions, that is no longer the case, he said.
“The court generally accepted the government’s representation. Now, that’s all gone,” Wilson said. “The credibility of DOJ suffers directly and collaterally for the stuff that Trump does.”
In Minneapolis, which has been at the center of clashes over the president’s immigration enforcement policies, nearly half the lawyers in the U.S. Attorney’s office there have left, according to an article in the Minnesota Star-Tribune.
The attorneys cited concerns about ethics, political pressure and the administration’s decision to prioritize immigration, the newspaper reported.
A federal prosecutor detailed to the Minneapolis office lost her composure in February during an immigration hearing, according to media reports.
“The system sucks,” Julie Le told the judge. “This job sucks. I wish you could hold me in contempt so that I could get 24 hours of sleep.”
Harry Litman was the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh from 1998 to 2001, serving during the Bill Clinton administration. He said the Minneapolis office is similar to Pittsburgh’s.
“And because of the immigration cyclone that landed there, that office has been torn limb from limb,” said Litman, who now hosts a national podcast called Talking Feds.
Litman doesn’t believe any office would be immune.
Other scandals that have rocked federal prosecutors during this administration include Trump naming as interim U.S. attorneys two of his personal lawyers: Lindsey Halligan, in the Eastern District of Virginia, and Alina Habba, in New Jersey.
Halligan, who had no prior experience as a federal prosecutor, quickly secured indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, though they were later dismissed by a federal judge.
Halligan was severely criticized for failing to present the final Comey indictment to the grand jury and showing it, instead, only to the foreperson and one other member.
Both Halligan and Habba resigned after federal courts found they were in the posts unlawfully.
“This administration has obliterated the norms and values that held DOJ together throughout its existence,” said Wilson, the retired line prosecutor in Pittsburgh.
Expecting allegiance
Traditionally, when presidential administrations change, Cindrich said, there is an uptick in attorneys leaving district offices.
Those prosecutors, he said, leave for a variety of reasons — some take higher-paying jobs in the private sector; some retire; others teach.
But the numbers seen since Trump returned to office are shocking, according to seven current or former prosecutors in the office.
At the end of 2024, the Justice Department had 12,955 attorneys, according to Office of Personnel Management data published online by former FBI intelligence analyst Philip Fields.
Between January 2025 to January 2026, Fields reported, more than a quarter of those attorneys — 3,402 — left the DOJ.
The departing prosecutors had an average of nearly 14 years of experience.
Roiphe attributes the exodus to two main factors: either the job under the current administration doesn’t fit with the attorneys’ sense of professional pride, or they fear being pressured to do something unethical.
She cited a Jan. 31 post on X by Chad Mizelle, who was the Justice Department’s chief of staff for most of 2025 under Trump.
Mizelle wrote: “If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me. We need good prosecutors. And DOJ is hiring across the country. Now is your chance to join the mission and do good for our country.”
Roiphe said posts like Mizelle’s can have an impact.
“I don’t know how much they’ve implemented that,” Roiphe said. “But they’ve certainly sent a message that this is the kind of allegiance they expect.
“If so, that’s problematic.”
Riding it out
Litman said even the large volume of departures does not reveal the full damage done to the Justice Department.
“It says to me that the institution has been ravaged and hollowed out,” he said.
Offices are understaffed, and because so many supervisors have left, young attorneys have little guidance, he continued.
“There’s a real leadership vacuum,” Litman said. “They’re just looking for warm bodies.”
For years, the former prosecutors said, when an opening came up in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Pittsburgh, they would receive hundreds of applications.
That is no longer the case. While there used to be a minimum of three to five years experience before a candidate would even be considered, that also has changed. Now the requirement is just one year.
Cindrich said that could bode poorly.
“If people are being hired for their strong political views instead of their strong legal acumen, that’s a real problem,” he said. “If you’re hiring based on ideological grounds, that’s a bad idea.”
For attorneys in the Justice Department, there has always been a sense of pride that they are serving the public, Roiphe said.
For the career prosecutors who have stayed under the current administration, she said, it’s likely out of a sense of allegiance to that.
“They have a commitment to the notion of what DOJ was and want to keep that culture and mission alive,” she said. “I think they’re probably hoping to ride this difficult time out and hope it goes back.”
After the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Litman said, it took generations for the department to restore itself.
“All of that has been totally squandered,” he said. “It’s going to be a Herculean task to restore or rebuild.”
Wilson agreed.
“DOJ will suffer for a generation to come,” he said. “You can’t put back together the intangibles.”
Insulated no more
Cindrich, who was the U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh nominated by President Jimmy Carter, said that traditionally, federal prosecutors’ offices were removed from the politics of Washington.
Throughout his three years as the head federal law enforcement official in Western Pennsylvania, Cindrich said he never once got a political call from the White House or Justice Department in Washington.
“There’s a level of insulation built in,” Cindrich said.
U.S. attorneys in the 94 districts across the country are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. They are often suggested to the president by a state’s U.S. senators.
Under federal law, the only way to remove a sitting U.S. attorney is by impeachment.
“There’s no firing,” Cindrich said. “And for that reason, U.S. attorney’s offices across the country have a degree of independence — even from Main Justice — and that’s a good thing.”
But, under the current administration, Cessar said, there’s no way to predict what will happen or how its priorities will change.
“We’re subject to the whims and caprice of what happens,” he said.
120 days
In January, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi named Rivetti, the former first assistant and acting U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, to run the office on an interim basis.
According to federal law, an interim U.S. attorney appointed by the attorney general may serve up to 120 days or until the confirmation of a presidential appointment.
If no one is nominated, the federal district court can make an appointment until the vacancy is filled.
That situation recently occurred in the District of New Jersey. In that scenario, the person chosen by the courts to fill the role was also supported by the Trump administration.
In the meantime, former colleagues say Rivetti is continuing to lead the office effectively, even in the midst of chaos — including Trump’s recent firing of Bondi and the onslaught of immigration cases overwhelming the office.
“While there has been an increase in personnel changes in the office over the last few years, Troy and his leadership team have quickly adapted,” said Tina Miller, a former federal prosecutor in Pittsburgh who now works in private criminal defense.
Rivetti will hit 120 days at the end of May.