U.S. Attorney Was Forced Out After Clashes Over How to Handle Russia Inquiry

Career prosecutors at the Justice Department do not believe criminal charges are warranted from an investigation seeking to discredit an earlier F.B.I. inquiry into Russia’s attempt to tilt the 2016 election in President Trump’s favor, according to people familiar with the matter.

It leaves unclear what political appointees at the Justice Department might do, given the breadth of Mr. Trump’s demands that it pursue people he perceives as enemies. Already, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia overseeing the case, Todd Gilbert, was forced to resign in August because he refused to sideline a high-ranking career prosecutor who found the evidence flimsy, the people familiar with the matter said.

Senior Justice Department officials had ordered Mr. Gilbert to open a grand jury investigation into whether anyone at F.B.I. headquarters during and after the Biden administration had mishandled classified documents related to the Russia investigation that Mr. Trump has long decried as a “witch hunt” against him.

Even as news of Mr. Gilbert’s departure over the summer raised concerns about turmoil inside the Justice Department, the events leading up to it have remained unclear until now. The new details highlight how Mr. Trump’s push for criminal prosecutions of those he sees as enemies has led to crises inside multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices, in this instance dooming a top prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia, based in Roanoke. Similar disputes consumed Mr. Gilbert’s counterpart in eastern Virginia, Erik S. Siebert, in recent weeks.

Mr. Gilbert was a longtime Republican legislator in Virginia until he was sworn in as the top prosecutor in July. He was quickly ordered to take up a case championed by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, after they learned that classified documents had been found inside “burn bags” at F.B.I. headquarters.

For decades, classified documents have been retained on computer servers. When printouts are made of sensitive documents, officials often dispose of them by burning the papers as a security measure. Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino are among the Trump loyalists who have pressed for an investigation to determine whether senior F.B.I. officials at the time had conspired to protect former F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials by hiding or destroying such documents.