Title: U.S. Attorney in Eastern Virginia announces resignation - ABC News
Headings: U.S. Attorney in Eastern Virginia announces resignation
U.S. Attorney in Eastern Virginia announces resignation
Content: Building the case and bringing the pair to Virginia required years of work, domestically and internationally, with competition from other U.S. Attorney offices looking to build the case. “To have those two individuals sitting in the Eastern District of Virginia — innocent until proven guilty — but to have them here on U.S. soil knowing everything that went into the charges being built, getting the evidence we needed from the U.K. and then the lengths to make sure they were safely in custody during a global pandemic ... Iogistically, that was probably one of most difficult cases I’ve ever seen,” he said. Terwilliger, a Republican whose father, George Terwilliger, was a a deputy attorney general and acting attorney general in GOP administrations, is leaving at a time when the Justice Department faces criticism that it became politicized during the Trump administration and particularly under U.S. Attorney General William Barr. Terwilliger said he expects some people will always hold it against him that he was an appointee of President Donald Trump, but he does not think most people feel that way, and he said his independence as a prosecutor was never compromised. “I didn’t see things done out of politics,” he said in an interview. " I can’t think of a single instance where someone turned around said ‘You will do this. This is your decision.’” Before his time as U.S. Attorney, he served as chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote the memo that laid out justification for firing FBI Director James Comey for his handling of the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server, when most people believe Trump wanted Comey fired for pursuing the investigation into Russian election interference. Rosenstein's memo specifically faulted Comey for a news conference he held in 2016, without informing the attorney general, that the investigation had concluded with insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges, but still commenting that Clinton and her team had been “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information. “We all shared in the same belief that that press conference was highly inappropriate and just wrong," Terwilliger said. “