Proud prosecutors tend to talk about the defendants they sent to prison, not the ones who went free. Ryan Crosswell leads with the latter.
Crosswell is running for Congress in eastern Pennsylvania, and while knocking on doors there last week, he introduced himself to voters by explaining that he was one of the federal prosecutors who quit rather than agreeing to drop the criminal case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Crosswell was a member of the Justice Department’s elite Public Integrity Section, which has been obliterated in all but name under the Trump administration. And now that he’s running for office, his years prosecuting public officials are his primary credentials for quickly gaining people’s trust, especially those who despair at President Donald Trump’s retaliatory firings of career government employees and what a federal judge in Boston last week lamented as a president who “simply ignores” the nation’s laws.
“Everything is concerning. Every day is: What fresh hell are we going to get today?” Michelle Messa told him outside her home in suburban Easton. “I shouldn’t be fearing my government right now.”
“It makes me sad to hear that,” Crosswell said, glancing down at Messa’s driveway and holding his hands at his hips. “The Founding Fathers couldn’t anticipate this. They expected George Washington, not Donald Trump. It’s the rule of law that makes this country great.”
That’s the creed that Crosswell and so many of his former colleagues now repeat as they search for jobs and speak out against what they see as a frontal assault on democracy. Some are now teaching. Others have secured coveted partnerships at white-shoe law firms. Crosswell got a job reviewing documents for a few hours each week at a plaintiffs’ law firm; it’s “enough to pay the bills,” he says, as he launches his first-ever political campaign.
Crosswell said he started mulling over a foray into politics in March, shortly after leaving the Justice Department and while preparing to move back up North. His campaign filed the official paperwork in June.
He’s raised $320,979 so far, according to Federal Election Commission records — that’s roughly $100,000 more than each of the two candidates he’s competing with in the Democratic primary next May. One is Carol Obando-Derstine, a Colombian-born executive at PPL Electric Utilities, the local power utility. The other is Lamont McClure, who since 2018 has been the highest-ranking county politician in Northampton, which spans a large slice of the 7th Congressional District.
Asked about the competition from a fellow Democratic candidate, Obando-Derstine issued a statement to NOTUS that said, “I have dedicated my life to standing up for the working families of PA-07. Crosswell, on the other hand, was a willing foot soldier for Donald Trump and a registered Republican during an administration that put kids in cages, incited an insurrection, spread lies about our elections, and corrupted the Department of Justice. He seems to have found a conscience and local residence in time to run for office.”
Crosswell’s campaign manager, Noa Worob, called the comment “insulting to every federal employee whose career in public service has spanned multiple administrations” and claimed that Crosswell “is the only candidate in this race who has actually fought back against President Trump.”
Crosswell’s fundraising so far is still a fraction of the $1.46 million war chest belonging to Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, the Republican who currently holds the seat. But Crosswell’s list of donors is a “who’s who” of Justice Department veterans with a history of confronting Trump: James Pearce, once an attorney on the Special Counsel Jack Smith team that prosecuted Trump; Liz Oyer, the U.S. pardon attorney who got fired when she refused a Trump administration command to recommend reinstating actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights despite his 2011 domestic violence conviction; and Kenneth Polite, who oversaw the DOJ’s criminal division when it launched the department’s largest ever criminal investigation — against Trump-loyal Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
Crosswell acknowledges that he’s up against a formidable challenge: not just Mackenzie’s money but the notion that law enforcement is the exclusive province of the GOP. But he points to his service in the U.S. Marines — which continues to this day as a lawyer in the Marine Reserves — and to his long track record as a federal prosecutor.
Crosswell is listed as an attorney in 374 criminal cases stretching across 11 years from his time as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego to his final years on the public integrity team. NOTUS reviewed dozens of them and asked Crosswell about them as he sat at a coffee shop in Allentown.
There’s his prosecution of Raymond Reggie, the owner of a car dealership advertising firm who was sentenced to 11-plus years in prison for faking expenses.
“Do you know who Reggie is?” Crosswell chuckled. “That’s Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law ... just in case you think this is some partisan ‘deep state’ thing.”
There’s Brian Johnson, who got nearly three years in prison for hacking into Georgia-Pacific’s computers after he got fired.
“He was shutting down operations of things in the plant in a way that could hurt people there,” he said. “We should broaden the laws requiring companies that are hacked to report to the feds, like ‘suspicious activity reports’ with banks.”
Then there was the sprawling investigation that landed several people in prison for bribing local officials in Cataño, Puerto Rico.
“I’ve been trying to explain to voters that corruption is a kitchen table issue,” Crosswell said. “At the municipal level, when you have contractors bribing mayors to get local contracts — be it paving, trash pickup, whatever — those contractors need to bake those costs into the price they’re charging the public. That is how corruption becomes a local issue. People unknowingly may be paying more to have their garbage hauled, telephone poles fixed, streets paved.”
Inevitably, the conversation turned to the way Trump has rapidly dismantled Nixon-era reforms to tackle graft. Attorney General Pam Bondi, just a day after her Senate confirmation, disbanded the DOJ task force that cracks down on unregistered foreign agents who engage in political activities in the United States. The very next week, the White House halted enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which targets Americans who make bribes abroad to score favorable business deals.
The way the Trump administration has turned its back on prosecuting corruption is, in some ways, a personal matter for Crosswell. His relaxed demeanor suddenly went grim when he was asked about the way the DOJ reversed course on what was his three-year criminal case against former Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced of Puerto Rico. She was facing felony charges, accused of accepting bribes from a billionaire foreign banker — until she hired Trump’s former defense lawyer, Chris Kise, who met with top DOJ officials in May. She has since pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. The judge, who rejected earlier attempts to dismiss the case, blasted what she called “the government’s decision to shift gears at the eleventh hour.”
“I left the Public Integrity Section in February,” Crosswell reminded me, now speaking slowly and choosing his words carefully. “I know the prosecutors on the case. They are dedicated professionals. They are great prosecutors. I’m willing to assume that they were put under a tremendous amount of pressure,” he said, the pain visible on his face. “I don’t believe misdemeanors sufficiently address what I believe occurred.”
During a car ride on his way to visit a nonprofit that runs a transition home for homeless and struggling war veterans, Crosswell described the tense moments that led to his abrupt departure from the DOJ. The broader story is well-trodden ground at this point: the cascading scandal over the way Emil Bove, the Trump personal defense lawyer then in charge as acting deputy attorney general, couldn’t get the U.S. attorney in Manhattan to drop the Adams corruption case and demanded that Public Integrity Section lawyers do it instead.
Crosswell remembers quickly convening his parents and sisters on their first-ever group FaceTime call to tell them, “Tomorrow may be my last day with Justice, because I’m not signing this thing.”
“It was really hard on my mom. She knows how hard I worked to get there,” he said, remembering the countless cover letters he submitted to become a federal prosecutor.
He now aims to leverage that experience to stand apart in the run-up to the Democratic primary, something he brought up at every house visit last week. And he hopes that his resume resonates with voters who worry about the issues dominating the headlines.
“Campaign finance, bribery, election-related violence, border crimes like drug trafficking. I’ve prosecuted many, many people for coming to this country illegally. I have a familiarity with all these issues that are front and center. I don’t really need to study for the test,” he said.