A former federal prosecutor in Miami has sued the Department of Justice, claiming he was fired last year over blog posts he wrote criticizing Donald Trump years before he ever joined the U.S. Attorney's Office. Will Rosenzweig, 40, says he learned he had lost his job when his government-issued phone abruptly lost service while he was observing Rosh Hashanah with his family.
Rosenzweig, who spent five years as a federal prosecutor in Miami, filed the lawsuit in Miami federal court against the Department of Justice and senior officials, according to the Miami Herald. He asserts that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones and the department violated his First Amendment rights and other federal legal protections. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi fired Rosenzweig by email on September 23, 2025, without giving a reason, per the Herald's reporting. Bondi was not named as a defendant in the suit because Trump has since fired her, the paper notes.
A Blog Written Long Before He Was a Prosecutor
The dispute traces back to a personal blog called Hosts of Error, which Rosenzweig wrote as a private citizen starting in 2017, before he joined the Miami U.S. Attorney's Office in September 2020. The blog, active for three years before he took it down in January 2019, mixed political commentary with essays on college basketball and March Madness, Pete Rose's legacy, air travel, a trip to Napa Valley and a travel review of Toronto. Archived posts referred to Trump as “mentally unfit” and an “institutional terrorist,” language that resurfaced publicly in September 2025 when conservative commentator Natalie Winters posted about it on X, drawing roughly 1.5 million views, according to the Herald. Activist Laura Loomer also posted that Rosenzweig had been fired after being exposed for running an anti-Trump blog, and Winters had called for his firing.
Federal guidance from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel has held that federal employees do not violate the Hatch Act by writing personal blogs expressing partisan views while off duty, so long as they are not using their official title or government resources. That guidance is notable here because Rosenzweig wrote the posts while working in private practice at Kobre & Kim in Washington, D.C., not while employed by the Justice Department. Under the Supreme Court's 1968 ruling in Pickering v. Board of Education, public employees retain First Amendment protection for speech as private citizens on matters of public concern, so long as it doesn't unduly disrupt government operations — a standard Rosenzweig's suit puts squarely at issue.
A Firing That Nearly Upended a Major Fraud Trial
At the time of his termination, Rosenzweig was deeply involved in a $17 million healthcare-fraud case that was scheduled for trial in Miami federal court in October 2025 and had been described by supervisors as a formidable advocate in court, tremendously efficient in managing his cases and the consummate team player. His abrupt firing nearly derailed that trial: prosecutors initially told the court they were unprepared to proceed without their lead trial attorney, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Another prosecutor ultimately replaced Rosenzweig in the case, and two white-collar defendants were convicted.
Rosenzweig worked in the economic-crimes section of the Miami U.S. Attorney's Office and handled dozens of complex cases during his tenure, per the Herald. His lawsuit says Reding Quiñones, who became U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in August 2025 after being sworn in by Bondi in Washington, never contacted him about his termination. Rosenzweig is seeking his former position back, a declaration that the defendants violated his constitutional and administrative rights, and monetary damages. Blanche and Reding Quiñones did not respond to requests for comment, the Herald reported.
Part of a Wider Wave of Departures
Because Rosenzweig served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the excepted service under 28 U.S.C. § 542, he lacked the civil-service tenure protections that would have let him appeal his removal to the Merit Systems Protection Board — a structural reason his only recourse was a constitutional lawsuit rather than an administrative appeal. His case is one of several involving Miami federal prosecutors let go under Bondi. Fellow Miami prosecutor Brooke C. Watson, 46, was terminated in July 2025 despite having received Justice Department awards in 2023 for prosecuting a roughly $50 million COVID-19 loan fraud scheme and in 2024 for disrupting a ransomware group; she had also temporarily worked on Jack Smith's special-counsel team. Another prosecutor, Michael Thakur, who worked on the documents case accusing Trump of withholding top-secret materials, was fired by the Justice Department in January 2025. A third Miami prosecutor, Anne McNamara, was also terminated after joining Smith's team in Washington.
Jack Smith led the prosecution of Trump over his alleged role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol before dismissing the federal criminal cases in 2024 following Trump's 2024 election win. Trump later pardoned almost all of those charged in the January 6 investigation and commuted the sentences of more than a dozen people associated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, part of the political backdrop against which the Miami prosecutors' firings have played out. A broader analysis published by former senior DOJ official Paul Rosenzweig found that more than 6,400 employees left the Department of Justice after Trump's return to office in 2025, including 230 terminations and a loss of more than 75 percent of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, according to the Society for the Rule of Law.
The turnover has been acutely felt in Miami. The Southern District of Florida's U.S. Attorney's Office now has about half its usual number of lawyers, down from a staff of roughly 120 prosecutors, and legal observers have described a “brain drain” as veteran economic-crimes and trial prosecutors left the office following the initial round of firings, according to the Southern District of Florida Blog. Rosenzweig, who earned his bachelor's and law degrees from Cornell University, joined Miami law firm Meland Budwick as a partner in January 2026, where he now focuses on complex commercial litigation, Ponzi scheme asset recovery and trade secrets disputes.
