Our senior justice correspondent, Evan Perez, has the details.

Evan, so these are DOJ employees who investigated the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6th, led to many prosecutions, they've been fired.

Any justification offered?

Well, the justification that's being offered by the Justice Department is that they were converted to stay on after those cases ended, and the new leadership says that that is tying their hands, and they don't want them there anymore.

And so what this is, is more than a dozen prosecutors, Jim, who were brought on temporarily because there was a surge of activity and cases that were being handled, and near the end of the Biden administration, they were converted to stay on inside the U.S.

Attorney's Office in Washington.

And I'll read you just a part of what Emil Bove, who's the acting Deputy Attorney General, says.

He says that the matter in which these conversions were executed resulted in the mass purportedly permanent hiring of a group of AUSAs, these are Assistant U.S.

Attorneys, in the weeks leading up to President Trump's second inauguration, which has improperly hindered the ability of the acting U.S.

Attorney to staff his office.

So what they're saying is that this is subversive personnel actions by the previous administration that they want to stop.

Now separately from this, we also know that FBI agents are expected to also be targeted as part of this purge.

Now, these are agents who worked the January 6th cases, as well as the cases, the investigation of Donald Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Now, the difference, as you know, Jim, is that agents really have no choice on what cases they're assigned, right?

They are told what cases to work.

And so there's a lot of consternation inside the FBI as to why these people would necessarily been targeted for doing simply their jobs.

But let me ask you, those FBI agents, they were not temporary hires, right, for this particular case.

So the justification offered for firing the Justice Department officials does not hold up for firing the FBI officials.

Right.

Those are career agents and analysts.

And so the question now, Jim, becomes whether, you know, obviously whether these firings and if any reassignments, any of that holds up in court if these people decide to challenge and file lawsuits over the handling of their careers.

Evan, thanks so much.

Please stay with us.

I want to bring in CNN senior legal analyst, Ellie Honig.

Evan, it feels like we're witnessing a Saturday Night Massacre times.

Well, pick your multiplier there.

You just wrote a piece, Ellie, for New York Magazine about how Trump has already changed the Justice Department.

I'm quoting you to yourself here.

Imagine working at the Justice Department right now and discovering some investigative thread that might lead to the president or someone close to him or some administration big wig.

What are your choices?

Follow up and get fired or look away and keep your job.

Either way, the case goes nowhere.

I wonder, is that the result of these decisions in your view, Ellie, or perhaps the goal as well?

Well, I think it's absolutely the result of these decisions.

Jim, and what we are seeing here is completely abnormal.

And here's why.

Within the Justice Department, there are a very few handful of positions that are political appointees, the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and a handful of others.

It is completely normal and appropriate for a new presidential administration to fire and replace those people.

This is why Merrick Garland is no longer the attorney general.

But the vast majority of prosecutors, like I once was, FBI agents who work at DOJ, 99 plus percent are non-political appointees or people who get hired based on their qualifications and their job is to just do the work, to follow the facts.

That is the very essence of DOJ.

When you come in and start firing those non-political appointees, as Donald Trump has been doing, you send a message that simply cannot be missed, that if you do something that threatens the power structure here, you could lose your job.

And Evan, you've covered these agencies, the FBI and the DOJ for some time.

And while Trump may claim that this is deep state or some sort of partisan operation, just explain the variety of viewpoints, if that's the correct way to describe it, that operate in those agencies.

But also just the broader rule, or what used to be the rule, right, were that these were civil servants who served administrations, whether Democrat or Republican.

Right, exactly.

I mean, most of these people, you know, some of them get hired during Republican administrations.

They stay on during Democratic administrations.

You know, they don't necessarily love the politics of whoever's president, but they carry out the work because a lot of what they do is not political.

A lot of the cases that they work are criminal cases.

It's just, you know, the bread and butter of what is supposed to be law enforcement.

And by the way, you know, some of the people that they've ousted, some of the people that they've pushed out are people who are actually brought on under Bill Barr or under Jeff Sessions, who were obviously not looking for leftists to be installing in the government.

That's what the irony is, is that some of the people that they've removed are actually people who were Republican appointees at some point and have stayed on.

And so that's one of the interesting things about this level of purge that's been going on because it has touched not only people who are at the upper echelons, but they're starting to move way below.

And the goal apparently is to try to bring in more pro-Trump people into the government administration.

Ellie, is there any legal recourse for these individuals who have been fired?

Generally, yes, Jim.

So most of these people have some level of civil service protection, meaning ordinarily before you can be fired under the civil service rules, you have to be given administrative process and notice and a hearing and all that.

Donald Trump seems to want to flip that, where I fire you first and then you can take the time and expense going out and hiring an attorney and challenging this.

So we could see challenges.

And Jim, just to one important point that Evan made, when you are on the line, as we used to say, which I used to be, part of the reason you can do your job effectively is it doesn't matter who the president is.

It happened in my experience that my first half of my experience at DOJ was under a Republican administration, switched over to the Obama administration.

I had another second half under the Obama administration.

It made zero difference to the work we did in New York.

It made zero difference to our pursuit of these criminal cases.

That's the way it ought to be.

But when you're firing people explicitly for political reasons, and the letter that went out earlier this week said the reason you're being fired is because you worked on the case against Trump.

That changes the very nature of DOJ.

And yet it's happening.

For our eyes.

Evan Perez, Eli Honig.

Thanks so much.