Former assistant US attorney put on leave over federal DEI policies compares Trump's tactics to communist Czechoslovakia

• Former Assistant US Attorney Alex Kristofcak was put on leave after criticizing Trump's DEI policy.
• He has since left his position at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
• Kristofcak is now urging leaders to speak out against Trump's attacks on the judiciary.

A former assistant US attorney said he was put on leave after publicly criticizing the Trump administration's DEI policies.

He's not going quietly.

Alex Kristofcak, 44, who was until recently a federal attorney focused on civil litigation in the Southern District of New York, was put on administrative leave after a "critical social media post."

He has since resigned from his position altogether, though he plans to continue working in the legal industry, he told Business Insider.

In a LinkedIn post two weeks ago, Kristofcak criticized a US attorney in Washington, DC, who sent a letter to the dean of Georgetown Law School to enforce anti-DEI policies at the university. Kristofcak called the letter a "grotesque abuse of power" at the time.

The next day, he was placed on administrative leave.

"I've been told in no uncertain terms that my criticism prompted this action," Kristofcak said in a new LinkedIn post on Saturday.

The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York could not be reached by phone Sunday evening. The White House and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

"While the experience has been jarring, it is not wholly surprising: the Trump administration has made it clear that it does not tolerate dissent," Kristofcak said on LinkedIn. "And because of my background, I am familiar with this playbook. When I was born in Czechoslovakia in 1981, my homeland was still under communist rule. Though I was fortunate to experience the country's democratic transition as a child in 1989, my formative years were shaped by fresh memories of dictatorship and its tactics."

Trump has also targeted several Big Law firms — like Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, and Covington & Burling — ordering reviews of their government contracts, stripping the firm's lawyers of their security clearances, and preventing employees of the firms from entering federal buildings.

Trump has described the firms as "dishonest and dangerous," accusing each of weaponizing the judicial process and threatening national security by representing his opponents or participating in investigations into his finances and behavior.

In a memo on Friday, Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to flag firms affiliated with "frivolous" lawsuits against his administration so that he could consider executive actions against them. Trump's memo called the behavior of some law firms "unscrupulous."

Since taking office, the Trump administration has made sweeping changes to the federal government, targeting everything from public education to veteran affairs.

Many of the president's executive orders have been blocked or delayed by judges amid ongoing lawsuits, including challenging the termination of DEI programs.

"I was already planning to leave the Department of Justice at the end of the month. I had concluded that the hostile environment created by President Trump, Elon Musk, and the political appointees at the Justice Department made my position untenable," Kristofcak said on LinkedIn.

The politicization of the department and "the treatment of other career employees" pushed him to leave his post, he told BI.

"As we speak, there are a lot of conversations happening where people are trying to figure out where they want to land on the spectrum of responses," Kristofcak said. "In the next couple of days, implicitly, everyone is either going to take a stand one way or another, or they will stay silent. That, in and of itself, will speak volumes."

There has been an exodus of top staff at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. In February, several top prosecutors resigned after refusing to abide by the Justice Department's request to drop federal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

On LinkedIn, Kristofcak urged those in positions of power to speak out.

"I grew up watching a totalitarian system collapse, giving way to democracy. Now, I find myself witnessing concerning parallels in my adopted homeland," Kristofcak said. "Speaking out may have cost me my position, but silence would have cost me much more."

He told BI that the responses from those in the industry over the next few days will be critical.

"Unfortunately, I really do believe that this is one of those things where everyone stands together or everyone falls together," he said.