MIAMI — A former federal prosecutor who was fired because he had made critical blog posts about Donald Trump during his first term as president has sued the top U.S. law enforcement officials in the nation and South Florida, saying in a lawsuit filed Friday they violated his free-speech rights when he was summarily terminated last year.

Will Rosenzweig, 40, was fired by then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi last September after Trump supporters called for his firing in social media posts after publicizing that the prosecutor had posted negative statements about the president when Rosenzweig was working as an attorney for a private law firm in Washington, D.C. — a few years before he was hired by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami.

Bondi fired Rosenzweig by email without giving a reason on Sept. 23, 2025, while he was observing the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, with his family — just two weeks before he was to be the lead prosecutor in a multimillion-dollar healthcare-fraud trial.

Rosenzweig, an Ivy League graduate who worked as a federal prosecutor for five years, asserted in his lawsuit that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones and the Department of Justice violated his legal protections under the First Amendment and other federal laws.

“The Department’s conduct rests on a single premise: a citizen must forever refrain from criticizing the government and its leaders to remain eligible to serve it,” says the suit, which was filed in Miami federal court.

“That rule would force every American who might one day serve to choose between speaking freely now and working for the government later. Conditioning public employment on political loyalty, where a party card rather than merit opens the door to a government job, is a way of life in Havana and Caracas. It has no place here.”

With his dismissal, Rosenzweig joined the ranks of dozens of federal prosecutors fired by Trump’s Justice Department in Washington, New York, Miami and other cities because they were believed to be at odds with the president or his political agenda. Rosenzweig — who was hired in January as a partner by the Miami law firm Meland Budwick — is seeking a declaration from the defendants that they violated his constitutional and administrative rights as a prosecutor. He also is seeking monetary damages and his former position in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Blanche and Reding Quiñones, who are named as defendants in their official capacity, did not immediately respond to requests for comments sent to the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney’s Office. The department also did not immediately respond. Bondi was not named as a defendant because she was fired by Trump in April.

Rosenzweig’s supervisors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami described him as “tremendously efficient in the management of his cases,” a “formidable advocate in court” and “the consummate team player,” according to the suit. Despite such accolades, he was the third federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida to be summarily fired by the Bondi-led Justice Department since Trump started his second term as president in January 2025.

But Rosenzweig wasn’t fired because he had been associated with the criminal investigations of Trump by the Justice Department’s special counsel during the prior Biden administration. That was why two other respected federal prosecutors in the Miami office were abruptly terminated last year.

Rather, Rosenzweig was fired, according to sources, because of the negative things that he said about Trump on his blog before he became a federal prosecutor in Miami in 2020. When he was working for the prominent law firm Kobre & Kim in Washington during Trump’s first term, Rosenzweig posted criticisms of the president starting in 2017 — posts that were brought to the attention of the Justice Department.

Last September, conservative political commentator Natalie Winters posted an “EXCLUSIVE” item on the social-media platform X about Rosenzweig’s “anti-Trump” blogging in the past, saying he “smeared him as a ‘mentally unfit’ ‘white supremacist.’ “

“Now he’s using government power to wage LAWFARE against MAGA patriots,” she wrote.

Winters, who tagged the X accounts of Bondi, Blanche and another senior official, included photos of Rosenzweig receiving a Justice Department award and a screenshot of his LinkedIn profile. Winter called for his firing in the X post, which was viewed about 1.5 millions times. Among her followers was one of the defendants in Rosenzweig’s healthcare-fraud case, according to his lawsuit.

Afterward, right-wing political activist Laura Loomer followed suit, posting on X: “SCOOP: DOJ sources tell me that Assistant US Attorney Will Rosenzweig was FIRED yesterday [Sept. 23] after he was exposed for running an anti-Trump blog.”

Rosenzweig’s suit pointed out that Winters’ post commented about anti-Trump blog commentary that “had been defunct for nearly seven years, with no recent postings.”

“Mr. Rosenzweig wrote each and every article when he was still a private citizen,” noted the suit, which was filed by the law firms Fridman, Fels & Soto in Miami and Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Connecticut.

The suit acknowledged that Rosenzweig wrote the blog, “Hosts of Error,” for three years, saying “it is true that as a private citizen” he “published criticisms of President Trump during his 2016 campaign and first presidential term.”

“But that was far from the primary purpose of the blog,” the suit said. The blog’s website included the subtitle: “Commentaries on politics, law, and other things.“

“The blog included a range of political commentary,” the suit stated. “For example, one post critiqued the political campaign of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, while another analyzed the drawbacks of potential Supreme Court nominations of then-President Barack Obama.

“Mr. Rosenzweig used his blog to comment on a host of non-political, anodyne topics, including: college basketball and the annual ‘March Madness’ tournament; the legacy of American baseball player Pete Rose; a trip to Napa Valley; a travel review of the Canadian city of Toronto; and an essay on air travel and flying,” the suit stated.

“And while many of his past posts did include criticisms of Trump both as president and candidate, the quantity of these posts was largely a function of the blog being active during a time when Trump’s actions were a central focus of then-current political events. In other words, Mr. Rosenzweig did not establish the blog with the intention of managing an ‘anti-Trump blog.’ ”

According to the suit, Rosenzweig took down his website in January 2019 before he was hired as an assistant U.S. attorney the following year.

Record as prosecutor

Rosenzweig, who obtained his bachelor’s and law degrees from Cornell University, joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in September 2020 toward the end of Trump’s first term before he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden.

Rosenzweig worked on dozens of complex cases as a prosecutor in the economic-crimes section, which focuses on healthcare fraud, money laundering and other financial schemes. He was deeply involved in a $17 million healthcare-fraud case that was scheduled for trial last October in Miami federal court, so his dismissal by Bondi caused disruption and delay. Another prosecutor replaced him, leading to the convictions of two white-collar defendants and long prison sentences.

At the time, Rosenzweig’s termination shocked several colleagues, who took note of the terrible timing because of the Jewish holiday and called it petty and another “frogmarch.” They also said his loss was a significant blow to an office that had witnessed a “brain drain” of veteran talent over the past year.

The South Florida office — with roughly 120 prosecutors on staff, about half the usual number of lawyers — was once known as one of the busiest in the country, but it’s now under siege.

Reding Quiñones, a former Miami-Dade County judge, took over as the new U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in August 2025. In a break from tradition, Reding Quiñones, a member of the conservative Federalist Society and a Trump loyalist, was sworn in by Bondi in Washington instead of by the Southern District of Florida’s chief federal judge.

Despite being the head of the South Florida office, Reding Quiñones “never contacted Mr. Rosenzweig about his termination” by Bondi the following month, according to the fired prosecutor’s suit.

Bondi fires another top Miami prosecutor

In July 2025, Bondi terminated another federal prosecutor in Miami, Brooke C. Watson, a seasoned lawyer who was honored in 2023 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland with a prestigious award recognizing her “exceptional dedication” to prosecuting a ring that used fake identities to commit about $50 million in COVID-19 loan fraud.

The previous year, Watson had received another Justice Department award for “exceptional service” for disrupting a ransomware group that threatened to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from computer networks worldwide.

As she did in Rosenzweig’s case, Bondi fired Watson in a terse email — providing no reason, according to sources familiar with her termination.

Watson, 46, who as deputy criminal chief was serving in one of the office’s senior positions, became another casualty in Trump’s mission to purge anyone found to have worked in some way for special counsel Jack Smith.

Smith led the prosecution of Trump for his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters trying to stop Congress’ certification of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Biden.

Watson was among about a dozen Justice Department employees, including a few federal prosecutors, who were terminated by Bondi a year ago — the latest wave of firings in the agency since Trump started his second term as president.

According to sources, Watson temporarily worked on the special counsel’s team, which recruited her to evaluate financial information related to the Jan. 6 case. The sources said Watson found no incriminating information that was used to prosecute Trump or the various right-wing, white-supremacist groups and individuals who rallied to hear the president speak that day on the Ellipse in Washington.

That was the extent of her involvement in the special counsel’s investigation, which led to more than 1,500 people being charged and most convicted of trespassing, vandalism, assault or seditious conspiracy. Upon taking office, Trump pardoned almost all of them and commuted the sentences of more than a dozen others associated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Watson, a Brown University graduate who received her law degree from Northeastern University, was the second federal prosecutor in the Miami office to be fired for playing a role in the special counsel’s Jan. 6 investigation or his classified-documents probe of Trump, a case that was filed in South Florida.

Other firings

In late January 2025, Miami federal prosecutor Michael Thakur, 46, a Harvard Law School graduate who worked on the documents case accusing Trump of withholding top-secret materials at his Palm Beach estate, was fired along with dozens of others who were members of the special counsel’s team.

In addition to Thakur, Anne McNamara, a former federal prosecutor in the Miami office before joining Smith’s team in Washington, was also terminated.

The Justice Department’s rolling purges of lawyers and employees who participated in the two federal criminal cases against Trump continued in Washington and other regions of the country. Smith had dismissed the cases after Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

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