U.S. Department of Justice fired prosecutor who withdrew from dismissed Adani bribery case rather than sign the dismissal motion

On September 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice fired Andrew Tyler, an acting assistant chief in the Criminal Division's Fraud Section, over unspecified "allegations of ethical violations," according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Tyler could not immediately be reached for comment; a person who had previously worked with him described him as a dedicated career employee.

Tyler and a co-counsel, Shy Jackson, had withdrawn from the department's prosecution of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and several co-defendants in a foreign-bribery and securities-fraud case -- an act reporting described as a quiet form of protest -- after senior officials moved in May 2026 to dismiss the charges. The dismissal motion was signed only by politically appointed Justice Department officials, not by the career prosecutors who had handled the case. U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York initially declined to dismiss the case, saying DOJ had not provided an adequate factual basis, and later said acting deputy attorney general Trent McCotter, who ordered the dismissal, had "eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment." Garaufis went on to dismiss the charges against Adani and several co-defendants but refused to drop the remaining counts against others, citing DOJ's failure to provide new reasons or facts for doing so.

Reporting describes Tyler's firing as the second this month of a career federal prosecutor who clashed with senior department officials over a high-profile case, following the firing of a Minneapolis-based prosecutor earlier in September over his handling of a civil-rights investigation into an ICE shooting.