A federal prosecutor in Los Angeles was fired Friday at the behest of the White House, after lawyers for a fast-food executive he was prosecuting pushed officials in Washington to drop all charges against him, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
Adam Schleifer was terminated Friday morning, receiving an email informing him that the dismissal was “on behalf of President Donald J. Trump,” according to two of the sources, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals from federal officials. Joseph T. McNally, the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California who is Schleifer’s boss, was not involved in the decision, the sources said.
Carley Palmer, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who is now a partner at Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg LLP, said Schleifer was fired via a “one line e-mail, and it came from a White House staff account.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles declined to comment. Schleifer declined a request to be interviewed. The White House and the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to inquiries.
The sources who spoke to The Times suspected the firing was motivated, in part, by a case Schleifer was assigned involving Andrew Wiederhorn, former chief executive of the company that owns fast-food chains Fatburger and Johnny Rockets.
Last May, a grand jury indicted Wiederhorn on charges that he hid taxable income from the federal government by dispersing “shareholder loans” from the company to himself and his family. Wiederhorn allegedly used the funds for personal benefits, according to the indictment, including payments for private jet travel, vacations, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, other luxury automobiles, jewelry and a piano. He has pleaded not guilty.
Wiederhorn’s lawyers have aggressively pushed Justice Department officials to drop the case, according to two sources familiar with those conversations who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.
The defense team has attacked the legal theory of the case and alleged Schleifer was biased, the sources said.
Wiederhorn’s defense attorney, Nicola Hanna, previously told The Times that prosecutors had exceeded the law in charging his client. “This is an unfortunate example of government overreach — and a case with no victims, no losses and no crimes,” Hanna said in a statement last year.
McNally was ordered to meet with Hanna and during the conversation Wiederhorn’s attorneys criticized Schleifer,the two sources said.
Hanna, the former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, and other members of Wiederhorn’s defense team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Two of the sources familiar with the matter said Schleifer received an email around 11:15 a.m. informing him of the termination. After Schleifer’s work phone was wiped remotely and his computer locked him out, fellow prosecutors helped him box up family photos and personal effects before he left.
Schleifer is a registered Democrat who made several unflattering remarks about Trump when he ran for an open congressional seat in New York’s 17th District in 2020. Schleifer’s father is the co-founder and chief executive of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron Technologies, and he faced criticism during his bid for office for refusing to pledge to divest himself from such holdings if elected, according to a column published in the Rockland/Westchester Journal News. Schleifer holds nearly $25 million in stock in the company.
Schleifer started with the U.S. attorney’s office in 2016. He prosecuted drug trafficking and fraud cases before quitting in 2019 for his congressional bid. He finished second in the Democratic primary and returned to his job as a federal prosecutor.
Though U.S. attorneys are political appointees who often ally with the agenda of the current presidential administration, line prosecutors like Schleifer are normally considered career employees. But since taking office, the Trump administration has made a point to drive those seen as political enemies from all levels of the federal government.
“This is the most overtly political firing I’ve seen in my time at the Department of Justice,” said Palmer, the former federal prosecutor. “I could absolutely see it having kind of a chilling effect. I also think current prosecutors are concerned about the ability to have free speech. An AUSA [assistant U.S. attorney] who I spoke to said they are concerned that the only people who will be allowed to stay are Republicans or very quiet Democrats.”
In January, Gregory Bernstein, who worked in the Major Frauds Section of the U.S. attorney’s office in L.A., was among more than a dozen lawyers fired across the Justice Department after working on special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Trump. Bernstein declined to comment.
In several social media posts during his political campaign, Schleifer attacked the president’s tax policies and Trump’s behavior toward federal agencies that have investigated him for a wide range of state and federal crimes.
In one 2020 tweet, Schleifer accused Trump of eroding constitutional integrity “every day with every lie and every act of heedless, narcissistic corruption.”
“It’s hard to imagine a President doing more to demoralize line prosecutors, law-enforcement partners, and faith in rule of law than he already has,” Schleifer tweeted in February 2020.
On Friday, Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur who has at times served as an advisor to Trump, shared one of Schleifer’s prior critical tweets on X and called for the prosecutor to be fired.
“We need to purge the US Attorney’s office of all leftist Trump haters,” Loomer wrote.
Although Loomer referred to Schleifer as a “Biden holdover,” he was hired back to the office ahead of Biden’s inauguration in 2021. According to sources, he was assigned the Fatburger case after his return.
One source inside the U.S. attorney’s office, who requested anonymity over concerns about retaliation, said “people are obviously very pissed.”
Though Schleifer’s family might be wealthy, the source said, the firing seemed politically motivated and meant to scare prosecutors who might pursue defendants who curry favor with Trump.
“No one feels particularly scared for his livelihood, but I do think it’s bull—,” the source said.
Another source, a former prosecutor who handled fraud cases in the U.S. attorney’s office and sought anonymity over concerns about facing professional backlash, said he believes Schleifer’s firing is “going to have an incredible chilling effect on any line federal prosecutor who is thinking about criminally investigating or prosecuting an executive of any company of any significance.”
“The message from Adam’s case is that if you’re going to indict some run-of-the-mill CEO of a company, you need to check if he’s a Trump supporter first,” the former prosecutor said. “It’s going to cause line prosecutors to be considerably more careful about pursuing anyone who has even tenuous connections to the president, which is not good for the DOJ.”
According to Federal Election Commission records, Wiederhorn has donated approximately $40,000 to Trump political action committees and the Republican National Committee since 2023.
The recent federal case comes nearly two decades after Wiederhorn was first ensnared in financial crimes. In 2004, he pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Oregon to charges of paying an illegal gratuity to an associate and to filing a false tax return. He spent 15 months in federal prison in Sheridan, Ore., and paid a $2-million fine.
Trump repeatedly complained about the “weaponization of the federal government” while facing investigations for improper handling of classified documents and fostering an insurrection with lies about election fraud, but since returning to office he has taken steps to bend the Department of Justice to his agenda.
Earlier this year, Trump appointees pushed for federal prosecutors in Manhattan to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, accused of accepting more than $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions from a Turkish government official. Several high-ranking prosecutors refused the order to drop charges against Adams and resigned in protest, with some alleging Trump is trying to force Adams to help deport record numbers of undocumented immigrants.
Last week, Trump named one of his personal attorneys and counselors, Alina Habba, as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Habba has no experience as a prosecutor, but represented Trump in several civil cases and served as an advisor to his political action committee.
Four current and former federal law enforcement sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, told The Times that Trump is strongly considering naming Assemblymember Bill Essayli (R-Riverside) as U.S. attorney in Los Angeles.
Essayli is a devoted Trump supporter who has staked out positions in lockstep with the president in the California Legislature, including pushing a bill in 2023 that would force schools to notify parents if their children were identifying with a gender that does not align with the sex on their birth certificate. The bill died in committee. Representatives for Essayli did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday.
Times staff writer Seema Mehta and the Associated Press contributed to this report.