Who Are the Prosecutors Helping Jack Smith Take On Donald Trump?

Federal prosecutors Thomas Windom and Molly Gaston will be sparring with Donald Trump’s defense team in a Washington courtroom Friday over what information the former president and his legal team can access and potentially make public.

They are part of the team of veteran prosecutors, experienced in public-corruption and national-security law, that is helping special counsel Jack Smith run his two unprecedented trials against Trump. 

Working for Smith, who was appointed in November, are about 40 to 60 lawyers, paralegals, support staff and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, many of whom he inherited from earlier investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his handling of classified documents after he left the White House. The special counsel’s office operates largely independently out of offices several miles away from the Justice Department’s main headquarters in downtown Washington.

“The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice,” Smith has said.

Having brought historic back-to-back indictments of Trump, Smith’s team members are now starting what are likely to be numerous court appearances on behalf of the government. In June, Smith charged the former president with 37 counts on seven different charges in the documents case, including willful retention of national-defense information, withholding a record, false statements and conspiracy to obstruct. The following month, Smith’s team brought three additional counts against Trump.

In the election-interference case, Smith on Aug. 1 charged Trump with four crimes, including conspiring to defraud the U.S., obstructing an official proceeding, and conspiring against the rights of voters. Trump has denied wrongdoing and accused prosecutors of pursuing him to undermine his bid to return to the White House.

Here’s a look at some of the prosecutors who have played more visible roles in Smith’s sprawling and continuing investigations.

Thomas Windom

Before Smith’s appointment as special counsel, the Justice Department assigned Windom to its investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, as it began later that year to develop cases alleging complex conspiracies and investigate sources of funding for the event. A veteran prosecutor from Maryland, Windom had developed a reputation as a standout investigator who scored convictions in several high-profile domestic-terrorism cases. 

Those cases include that of U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Paul Hasson, a white nationalist who was sentenced in 2020 to more than 13 years in prison for plotting to kill journalists, Supreme Court justices and politicians and having a cache of illegal weapons. Windom was also on the team that tried members of a violent white-supremacist group called “the Base,” successfully securing lengthy prison sentences. 

Windom, whose father served as the Republican lieutenant governor of Alabama, was among the first prosecutors to push investigators to explore the activities of several members of Trump’s inner circle. He was in court Aug. 3, when Trump pleaded not guilty to four crimes, including conspiring to defraud the U.S., obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring against the rights of voters.

Molly Gaston

Gaston was the prosecutor who on Aug. 1 handed up Trump’s election-interference indictment, then still sealed, to a federal magistrate judge. She has worked for years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, building a reputation as an aggressive prosecutor with experience investigating and trying high-profile political figures. She was involved in the prosecution of Trump’s longtime adviser, Steve Bannon, who was sentenced last year to four months in prison for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A judge allowed him to remain free while he appeals his conviction. 

Gaston’s other cases include that of Trump adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted in 2019 of lying to Congress about his efforts to make contact with the website WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign and whom Trump pardoned; former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, who was acquitted by a federal jury in 2019 on a felony false-statement charge stemming from legal work he performed for the government of Ukraine in 2012; and the investigation into whether Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s former No. 2 official, misled investigators about his role in providing information related to an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in October 2016 to a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. That probe was closed in early 2020 without criminal charges.

Joseph ‘J.P.’ Cooney

Gaston frequently works alongside Joseph ‘J.P.’ Cooney, a top public-corruption prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington known as a bold prosecutor who doesn’t shy away from big cases. Cooney worked alongside Smith when Smith headed the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, where he was involved in high-profile prosecutions of political figures. Cooney was on the team that launched an investigation into Sen.

Cooney has played a central role in the election-interference investigation, including probing Trump’s fundraising and ties between extremists and people in Trump’s orbit. Cooney was in the courtroom when Trump pleaded not guilty.

Jay Bratt

Jay Bratt, the chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export-control section, has played a central role in the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified national-security material at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Bratt was among investigators who visited the Florida club in June 2022 to discuss the missing documents with Trump’s lawyers, urging them to better secure a storage room where dozens of boxes had been found. That trip was followed by the extraordinary August 2022 FBI search of the property. 

Bratt has since appeared in court on behalf of the government following Trump’s June indictment on charges that he improperly retained classified material after he left the White House and obstructed investigators’ efforts to retrieve it.

Bratt has an extensive background in national-security law, having supervised cases involving classified information. They include that of James Hitselberger, a former Navy contract linguist who pleaded guilty to removing classified documents from a secure space at a base in Bahrain; Stephen Kim, the former State Department contractor who pleaded guilty in 2014 to leaking national-security information to a Fox News Channel reporter; and Bryan Underwood, a former civilian guard at a U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China, who was sentenced in 2013 to nine years in prison for trying to sell photos and information about the compound to China.

Bratt also oversaw the case against Huawei Technologies for violating U.S. sanctions related to Iran.

David Harbach

David Harbach, who has represented the government in early hearings in the Mar-a-Lago case, worked under Smith in the Public Integrity Section, where he became deputy chief. They also worked together at the Hague, where Harbach prosecuted war crimes that took place during the late 1990s Kosovo conflict. Smith was the chief prosecutor at the Hague investigating those crimes before being named special counsel.

Like the others, Harbach has been involved in high-profile, politically sensitive cases. He was among prosecutors who charged former Democratic Sen. John Edwards in 2011 on a novel legal theory that funds paid by an Edwards benefactor to the senator’s mistress were campaign expenses. At trial, the jury deadlocked on most of the charges and acquitted Edwards on one charge. 

Harbach, once a counsel to former FBI Director James Comey, also prosecuted Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia for accepting $175,000 worth of loans and gifts from a businessman with interests before the state. In an 8-0 decision, the Supreme Court overturned McDonnell’s conviction, saying prosecutors needed to show an explicit quid pro quo between gifts or donations and official actions to bring certain corruption charges.

Harbach prevailed in the case of Phillip Hamilton, a former Virginia lawmaker who was sentenced to 9½ years in prison for bribery and extortion. 

Julie Edelstein

Julie Edelstein has played a prominent role in the documents probe. She became deputy chief of the counterintelligence and export-control section in 2018, working closely with Bratt. She also has worked on espionage and leak cases including that of Candace Claiborne, a longtime State Department employee who was sentenced to more than three years in prison for lying about her 10-year relationship with two Chinese spies who allegedly gave her and her family tens of thousands of dollars in gifts in exchange for information.

She was also part of a team of officials who worked on investigations of alleged leaks of classified information to the media during the Trump administration. No charges were filed as a result of that probe. 

Write to Sadie Gurman at [email protected]