TAMPA, Fla. — For almost a month after he was fired from his job as a Tampa federal prosecutor, Michael Gordon refrained from publicly commenting on his situation.

He stayed quiet even as word spread that his ouster was political retaliation for his involvement in prosecutions against those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., called for his reinstatement. Victims in the $100 million fraud case against Leo Govoni — whom Gordon helped indict just before he was fired — decried the prosecutor’s ouster.

Now, with the chances of his reinstatement exceedingly unlikely, Gordon is talking — and going on the offensive.

This week, he plans to file a lawsuit challenging the legality of his dismissal.

“I lost my job, but not my voice,” he said.

The matter will play out against a legal backdrop in which allies of President Donald J. Trump have generally shunned laws meant to protect federal employees and supported the expansion of executive power.

Gordon spoke publicly this week with the Tampa Bay Times for the first time since he was fired. A student of history, who once taught it to high schoolers, he says he’s in this fight for the principle of it.

“It’s my belief that silence and fear are how authoritarianism wins,” he said. “I’m not scared. I will not be silent.”

The firing

On June 27, a Friday afternoon, Gordon was in his downtown Tampa office on a videoconference preparing a witness to testify in an upcoming trial. His door was closed. He heard a knock and ignored it. The person kept knocking, then barged inside.

He turned around to complain about the interruption. An office manager stood there, his face ashen.

Gordon’s thoughts turned to his family. Had there been an accident?

“Bad news,” the manager said softly. He showed him a paper.

The three paragraph memo was addressed to Gordon and labeled from “the attorney general.” In clinical verbiage, it informed Gordon that he’d been removed from his job as an assistant U.S. attorney and from all federal service, effective immediately. The memo gave no reason, but cited Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes powers of the presidency, and the “laws of the United States.”

It was signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The office manager couldn’t explain it.

Gordon said he was told someone had called 15 minutes earlier from the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, the administrative entity in Washington, D.C., that oversees federal prosecutor offices. He was told the caller instructed the office manager to show Gordon the letter, take his computer and phone, pack up his office and escort him out of the building. He was told not to involve anyone in the Tampa office’s leadership.

Gordon took a screenshot of the letter and shared it. His colleagues were dumbfounded. His bosses were blindsided.

The timing was perplexing. The notice came two days after Gordon underwent his semiannual job performance review, he said. His supervisor rated him “outstanding,” he said, a rating he’d maintained throughout his eight years as a federal prosecutor. He was given no suggestions for improvement.

He’d been praised earlier that week for his work on the high-profile case against Govoni, a St. Petersburg entrepreneur charged in a fraud conspiracy that bilked millions from trust funds meant to help injured and disabled people.

Gordon helped present the Govoni case to a grand jury, which issued an indictment June 18 for wire fraud and other crimes. The day before he was fired, Gordon successfully argued in court for Govoni to remain jailed while awaiting trial.

He worked for a week to try to get his termination rescinded, to no avail.

A prosecutor’s calling

Gordon, 47, had worked as a federal prosecutor based in Tampa since 2017.

He grew up in San Antonio, Texas. A graduate of Yale and New York University Law School, he spent seven years out of college teaching humanities to high school students near Washington, D.C., before entering law. He found his calling as a prosecutor of domestic violence cases in New York. He worked for the Manhattan district attorney’s office before family and friends brought him to Florida.

His early work as a fed focused on going after street gangs, violent crime and drug trafficking organizations.

Like many Americans, he was incensed when he saw footage of rioters swarming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He recognized the significance of the moment.

“A photo of this will be in my kids’ history books,” he remembers thinking.

In the weeks after the insurrection, a call went out across the Department of Justice for volunteers for temporary duty assisting in what was the largest criminal prosecution in the agency’s history. Gordon signed up and got picked.

A six-month stint in Washington turned into two years. As a senior trial counsel in the Capitol Siege Section, he brought to trial some of the highest-profile Jan. 6 defendants.

They included Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man who was famously photographed putting his feet up on a desk in the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also prosecuted Eric Munchel, referred to as the “zip tie guy,” who sought to take members of Congress hostage.

He’s disturbed at the distorted Jan. 6 narratives that have sprung up in some circles and efforts to downplay the seriousness of what occurred that day.

“Not only do I find it offensive, but I find it profoundly dangerous,” he said.

While not all of those present at the Capitol committed acts of violence, Gordon said what they helped perpetrate was no less of a stain on American history. No one, he said, should want to live in a country where the threat of violence from a particular group of citizens carries the day over persuasion, argument or voting.

“That’s not democracy,” he said. “That’s an anarchical free-for-all.”

The legal fight

Gordon doubts that Bondi herself was behind his termination. He doesn’t think she even knows who he is.

He suspects that the move instead originated with an entity called the Weaponization Working Group. It’s a body recently created by Trump to examine state and federal investigations of the president and Jan. 6 prosecutions.

Its director is Ed Martin, a Republican activist who has been described in media as a leading organizer of the Stop the Steal movement, which promoted the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election. Martin briefly served this year as the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. before various controversies nixed his Senate confirmation for the job.

Gordon said he and other federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases expected they may be fired since the day after Trump won the November election.

Until last month, though, the only people who had been terminated or dismissed were those who worked with the Special Counsel’s Office, which prosecuted Trump himself. Most of the rest figured they were safe.

Gordon was among three prosecutors with no ties to the Special Counsel who were let go.

“I lost my job for enforcing the law, not for breaking it,” he said.

Although he could appeal his firing to a federal employment board, that process has become dysfunctional under Trump, Gordon said.

He believes the president’s administration wants a legal fight like his because it would test whether things like civil service employment protections are constitutional. A Supreme Court ruling favoring what’s known as the unitary executive theory could void those protections and expand the president’s powers.

Gordon is ready for what he believes could be a long fight.

He has enjoyed spending more time at home with his wife and their two children. Still, he describes his loss as “heartbreaking” and “devastating.”

“I loved my job,” he said. “I loved standing for and representing the United States.”

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