A look at the team Jack Smith built to try to convict Donald Trump

One prosecuted white supremacists. Another won a high-profile case against Reality Winner, the government worker found guilty in 2018 of leaking sensitive intelligence information to the media. They’ve gone after alleged corruption by elected officials, with some victories and some resounding defeats.

And they’ve helped put notorious drug cartel leaders behind bars.

The attorneys special counsel Jack Smith has recruited to prosecute former president Donald Trump come from several divisions of the Justice Department, joining to work full time on two of the most highly scrutinized cases in the nation.

One group of prosecutors is investigating Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified materials at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club. The other is examining his alleged efforts to overturn the results of President Biden’s 2020 election victory - a case that parallels a separate, state-level investigation in Fulton County, Ga.

The federal investigations have led to indictments totaling 44 charges, to which Trump has pleaded not guilty. Trump also denies wrongdoing in Georgia, where he faces 13 state-level charges, and New York, where he faces 34 charges of falsifying business records in a state case related to hush money payments during the 2016 election campaign.

The Justice Department has been reluctant to disclose the names of individual prosecutors on Smith’s team, citing a rise in threats against them that has prompted extensive security precautions. That’s a departure from the practice of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who confirmed which prosecutors were investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and potential ties to the Trump campaign if reporters asked.

Still, as the Trump investigations have moved into the pretrial phase - and more documents that require prosecutors’ signatures are filed on public dockets - a clearer picture is starting to emerge.

The effort involves at least 40 lawyers, plus FBI agents and support staff, based on court filings and interviews with people familiar with the special counsel’s office. Some were working on the investigation even before Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Smith in November to serve as a special counsel - a designation that gives him more independence from Justice Department leaders than other federal prosecutors have. Garland made that decision once Trump formally announced his third run for the White House.

The mostly mid- and upper-level career prosecutors do not all work in the same place. Some are based in the special counsel’s Northeast Washington office - a satellite office of the Justice Department located near Union Station. Others work from their U.S. attorney or FBI offices in different states. In all, the investigation cost taxpayers more than $5.4 million in salaries, equipment and travel between November and April, according to public expense reports the special counsel must submit every six months.

The prosecutors are already being attacked as “SleazeBags” and “deranged” by Trump on social media and called out in online extremist forums. Court filings and hearings are closely scrutinized by news organizations and by pundits from across the political spectrum.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are looking to the teams to prove that the Justice Department can handle a defendant who is the former president, wanting the prosecutors to ensure that Trump - accused of obstructing an election and mishandling highly sensitive national secrets - is not treated as if he is above the law.

At least a few members of the special counsel teams served under Smith between 2010 and 2015 when he led the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section - a prestigious division that oversees election crimes and investigations into public officials. At least one worked with Smith in the federal prosecutors’ office in Nashville, where he started as a prosecutor in 2015 and then ran the office on an interim basis in 2017. And at least one worked with Smith in The Hague, where he was tasked with charging Kosovo war crimes starting in 2018.

The prosecutors far outnumber Trump’s legal defense team, a rotating roster of a half-dozen or so lead attorneys - some of whom are working on more than one of the former president’s four criminal cases.

Their experience prosecuting fraught, high-profile cases will be crucial, other veteran litigators said, as they prepare for two unprecedented trials that have already divided the nation.

“There are people who are going to accuse you, the case and the office of having political motives in every single case,” said Dan Schwager, a former federal prosecutor who worked in the public integrity unit and is now an attorney at American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group. “So the specialty is knowing how to let the facts and laws reign supreme over any political consideration.”

D.C. case: Jan. 6, 2020, election team

Smith took over the public integrity unit at a time when the section was struggling, having botched the high-profile criminal case of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

Smith’s top deputy from that period, Raymond Hulser, who eventually succeeded him as leader of the unit, is on the special counsel team.

Hulser was the lead prosecutor in the Justice Department’s failed case against Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), which ended with a hung jury and a federal judge dismissing the charges.

More recently, Hulser was involved in the case against former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who failed to comply with a subpoena related to the House’s Jan. 6 investigation. Navarro was convicted of contempt of Congress on Thursday.

J.P. Cooney, another member of the special counsel’s 2020 election team, worked as Hulser’s deputy at public integrity and had also worked with Smith in the unit.

Cooney was involved in the Menendez case. He also investigated former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe over alleged false statements McCabe made to the FBI about the bureau’s investigation of potential links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. The Justice Department decided not to prosecute McCabe, whom Trump continues to openly criticize for his role in the Russia investigation.

Molly Gaston, another member of Smith’s election team, also investigated McCabe. Gaston has worked in the Public Integrity Section within the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. and was part of the team that prosecuted Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon last year for contempt of Congress. Bannon was found guilty. She also signed the September 2021 subpoena that sought financial records relating to fundraising organizations launched by Sidney Powell, an attorney involved in Trump’s election-denying efforts. Powell fits the description of one of six unnamed co-conspirators in Trump’s D.C. indictment.

Not all the prosecutors working on the Jan. 6 case spent time in the public integrity unit.

Thomas Windom, a veteran prosecutor from the U.S. attorney’s office in Greenbelt, Md., has investigated alleged election obstruction by Trump and his allies since 2021 - long before Smith was tapped as special counsel.

Before joining the probe, he frequently worked cases related to national security in Maryland. In 2017 he prosecuted a National Security Agency computer developer who removed a huge amount of highly classified national defense information and stored it at home. And he successfully prosecuted members of a white supremacist group, known as the Base, on gun-related charges.

Harvey Eisenberg, a recently retired assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland who has prosecuted cases with lawyers on both special counsel teams, said Windom is known for working well with FBI agents to find holes in cases and determine what evidence is needed for a conviction.

Florida case: Classified documents team

Some prosecutors working for Smith on the Florida-based classified documents case came from the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, but most did not.

David Harbach spent time in public integrity at Justice and later was a legal adviser to then-FBI Director James B. Comey. More recently, he prosecuted war crimes at The Hague before going into private practice. At public integrity, he was the lead prosecutor in the government’s failed case against former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), which alleged that Edwards broke campaign finance laws when he used campaign money to pay his pregnant mistress during his 2008 presidential bid. A jury deadlocked on five charges and acquitted Edwards on one charge, and the government decided not retry the case.

A few years later, he was involved in the prosecution on corruption charges of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell (R), whose conviction at trial was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

Harbach also prosecuted former congressman Rick Renzi, a Republican from Arizona, on corruption and money-laundering charges. Renzi was sentenced to three years in prison.

Two of the other most visible prosecutors in the documents case, Jay Bratt and Julie Edelstein, have specialized in counterintelligence and espionage cases at Justice. That experience is relevant because Trump is charged with improperly retaining national defense information under a subsection of the Espionage Act, as well as obstructing government efforts to retrieve the material.

Bratt is the chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section within the National Security Division, a senior supervisory position.

He’s on leave from that job to work on the Trump documents case full time and has spoken in front of the Florida judge presiding over the case at multiple pretrial hearings so far.

Bratt was the senior Justice Department official who showed up to Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 to collect materials Trump was returning to the government after a subpoena demanding them back. Federal authorities soon developed evidence that the 38 documents with classified markings that the former president handed over were not the only classified documents in his possession, leading to an FBI search of the property last August and the eventual indictment.

Edelstein worked for Bratt at Justice Department headquarters and was a lead prosecutor against Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor who pleaded guilty to mishandling government secrets and was sentenced to five years in prison. David Aaron, a former prosecutor who worked with Edelstein on that case, said she is known to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the evidence in her cases, easily able to refer to any previous court filing.

“There is a real skill that comes with keeping track of everything that goes over to the defense,” Aaron said. “It can sound like bookkeeping. But when you are up against attorneys who are ready to make accusations against the prosecutors - and perhaps say things that are untrue - Julie is exactly the person you would want to get up and calmly state what the facts are and explain why the government’s decisions are correct.”

Some lawyers who are familiar with the special counsel team said the downside of attorneys coming from counterintelligence units is that they tend not to have significant amounts of trial experience. Compared with drug cases, for example, prosecutions involving spies and breaching classified document rules are not as common, can last for years and often result in guilty pleas before a trial.

Because of that, outside observers said, having South Florida prosecutors on the special counsel team as well is critical. At least two prosecutors from the Southern District of Florida are involved in the Trump case, with some of them working on it at least since FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago for documents in August 2022.

One of them is Karen Gilbert, based in Miami. Vanessa Singh Johannes, who worked in that office until 2021, said Gilbert is a “formidable” veteran prosecutor who is very comfortable in the courtroom and was responsible for training young lawyers for trials.

Gilbert and others in her office were formally reprimanded in 2009 after her team of prosecutors secretly recorded witnesses in a narcotics case being interviewed by defense attorneys. The recording was part of an investigation into alleged witness tampering in the case, which involved prescription pain pills. A court found the prosecutors had acted improperly, though an appeals court later overturned a part of that ruling that said the government needed to pay the defendant’s legal bills.

After the incident, which is still widely known in Miami’s criminal defense legal circles, Gilbert voluntarily stepped down from her position leading the narcotics section. She most recently served as national security section chief in the South Florida office.

Johannes said Michael Thakur, another Miami-based prosecutor on Smith’s team, also has a reputation as a talented arguer in the courtroom.

Legal experts said that every federal court district has a slightly different culture and rules, so it’s helpful to have local attorneys on a case who know the particularities of the judges and the district.

Neither Smith nor the prosecutors on his team have granted interviews about the Trump prosecutions, and they have made almost no public appearances outside the federal courthouses in D.C. and Florida.

After each grand jury indictment, however, Smith stood in a Justice Department news conference room to briefly address reporters, vowing to bring the cases to trial quickly and saying he hoped people would read the charges in full.

Both times, a few dozen members of his team stood in the back of the room, quietly watching.