The sacking of federal prosecutors for political reasons is unprecedented in the US, according to legal experts.

News emerged earlier this month that a number of prosecutors and other staff had lost their jobs in connection with the work of the so-called “weaponisation working group” established by US attorney general Pam Bondi in February.

The group has been tasked with identifying “political” or “unethical prosecutions” under the Biden administration, and was set up after Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people for their role in the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

The Washington Post now reports that over 40 prosecutors have been dismissed in the six months since Trump returned to the White House.

Those who have lost their jobs include Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor whose father, James Comey, is the FBI director who was controversially sacked by Trump in May 2017.

Mr Comey is a hate figure for Trump supporters because, having led the FBI during the 2016 election campaign, he was responsible for both investigations into a scandal involving Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia.

He was investigated by the Secret Service in May this year after posting a photo on X which Trump alleged was a coded message calling for his assassination.

Ms Comey had worked on the prosecutions of paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell, which are currently in the political spotlight.

Meanwhile, US legal experts have raised concern over the volume of so-called emergency rulings from the US Supreme Court, in which judges set out their majority decision without elaborating on their reasoning.

The court has granted emergency relief to the Trump administration a record seven times in the past 10 weeks.

Most recently, the court last week paved the way for Trump’s controversial abolition of the Department of Education, with the 6-3 majority ruling consisting of just a single four-sentence paragraph.

In a 19-page dissenting judgment, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority was “either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive” and that the “threat to our constitution’s separation of powers is grave”.