A federal prosecutor who resisted President Donald Trump’s demands to bring charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James was fired along with her deputy Friday evening, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The dismissal of the prosecutor, Elizabeth Yusi, was the latest fallout from attempts by career Justice Department officials to pump the brakes on Trump’s wide-ranging efforts to seek retribution against his perceived political opponents.
Yusi has worked for the Department of Justice for 18 years, according to her LinkedIn profile. She served in the Norfolk office of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia as the criminal chief.
Yusi led some of the Norfolk office’s most high-profile prosecutions, including the 2020 trial of Dr. Javaid Perwaiz, a former Chesapeake obstetrician and gynecologist who was found guilty of performing irreversible hysterectomies, improper sterilizations, and other medically unnecessary procedures on patients over more than a decade. Yusi later won the Department of Justice’s John Marshall trial litigation award for her work on that case.
Other prominent cases in which she won convictions involved former Virginia Beach business executive Daryl Bank, who ran a fraud scheme that caused hundreds of clients to lose all or most of their retirement savings, and Lt. Daniel Chase Harris, a former Navy pilot and Top Gun graduate who was sentenced to 50 years in prison for a sextortion case involving adolescent and teenage girls.
Yusi had pushed back against Trump’s public calls for James to be indicted, telling colleagues that she had not found probable cause to file charges, the people familiar with the matter said. It was not immediately clear why her deputy, Kristin G. Bird, had also been fired.
Bird had been with the Eastern District since 2019, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Here’s the Norfolk house at center of mortgage fraud case DOJ brought against Letitia James
Despite the concerns career prosecutors raised about the case, Trump’s inexperienced handpicked choice to lead the prosecutors office, Lindsey Halligan, secured an indictment against James last week, accusing her of mortgage fraud. The indictment said James had falsely claimed in loan documents that she would use a home she had purchased in Norfolk as a secondary residence, but instead had used it as a rental property, allowing her to receive favorable terms that saved her close to $19,000.
The firings of Yusi and Bird came less than a month after Halligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, resigned under pressure from Trump. Siebert, who had been chosen by the president to run the office, had taken a stand against his desire to seek charges against another of his adversaries: former FBI Director James Comey.
In the end, Halligan did Trump’s bidding in that case, too, personally presenting a case to a grand jury last month and securing an indictment against Comey that accused him of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia, which has traditionally handled some of the country’s most significant terrorism and national security cases, has been battered by dismissals and resignations, stemming from the cases against James and Comey. James and Comey have both denied the charges against them.
Maya Song, the office’s former first assistant U.S. attorney, was fired in the wake of Comey’s indictment, as was her replacement, Maggie Cleary, a well-known conservative lawyer in Virginia.
Comey’s son-in-law, Troy Edwards Jr., who handled national security cases, resigned in protest shortly after the indictment was returned. And Edwards’ boss, Michael P. Ben’Ary, was dismissed after a pro-Trump social media influencer wrongly accused him in an online post of having questioned the indictment of Comey.
The Pilot’s Jane Harper contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
https://www.pilotonline.com/2025/10/17/elizabeth-yusi-fired/

