When Donald Trump’s team discusses Jack Smith’s special counsel office, a handful of specific gripes keep coming up.
For years, Trump’s lawyers have complained internally that prosecutors were overenthusiastic in building out their cases and were playing by different rules. Now, those interpersonal grudges against DOJ officials are fueling the Trumpworld’s call to prosecute the prosecutors.
The particulars of the feuds may give a window into who could be an early target on the Trump vengeance tour.
Two sources familiar with Trump’s legal team told NOTUS they expect Trump and his team will seek to punish Jay Bratt, the DOJ’s counterintelligence chief within the department’s national security division, and possibly his deputy, Julie Edelstein. These sources said Trump’s camp also holds particular ill will toward J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston, prosecutors who worked in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which pursues corruption cases against politicians and law enforcement officers.
Cooney and Gaston were also on the team that successfully prosecuted Trump whisperer and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon — a case that sent the right-wing media figure to a federal prison for four months.
Bratt’s involvement in the Trump cases predated Smith’s appointment in November 2022. He helped Smith build the case that Trump had violated the Espionage Act and obstructed a federal investigation seeking to recover Top Secret documents.
“I think there’ll be an effort. If I was Jay Bratt, I’d be a little worried,” the first source said.
Three sources blamed Bratt, in particular, for increasing friction with Trump’s camp on several occasions as the investigation got underway.
For example, they claimed that when Trump’s defense team initially received a grand jury subpoena on May 11, 2022, demanding that he turn over all classified materials, there was an agreement that the May 24 deadline was “flexible.” Bratt called on May 24 asking for the documents, and when he was told they wouldn’t be delivered yet, he warned that Trump was already not complying with the subpoena, a potentially grave transgression that could have meant severe consequences for the former president. The warning aggravated Trump’s team, the sources said.
In the end, prosecutors granted a two-week extension, court records show.
But Trump’s team began to complain internally that the prosecutors weren’t playing fair. Things took a sharp turn downward during a meeting at DOJ headquarters in August 2022, when Bratt met with Stanley Woodward, the defense lawyer representing Walt Nauta, Trump’s valet and a potential witness who would later be indicted for helping Trump surreptitiously move boxes full of classified material around Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s team recounted the episode in a court filing to the District of Columbia’s chief judge: Woodward was led into a conference room where “Bratt waited with what appeared to be a folder containing information about Mr. Woodward.” Bratt told Woodward he didn’t consider him a “Trump lawyer,” noted that Woodward was up for a potential judicial appointment in D.C., and said, “I wouldn’t want you to do anything to mess that up.”
All three sources who spoke to NOTUS said they had heard about the incident and that it fueled resentment within the legal defense team for months.
Smith’s team denied that version of events. In court filings, Smith wrote that “there was never any threat or offer of a quid pro quo, explicit or implicit, to Woodward to secure Nauta’s cooperation. It did not happen. All four prosecutors present at the meeting are clear that it did not happen.”
The DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility has since confirmed to a congressional oversight panel that it had an open investigation into the Bratt matter, according to a letter earlier this month from House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan, who claimed “the information that you have provided only reinforces our concerns that OPR acts more to protect department prosecutors than to root out prosecutorial misconduct.”
The resentment against prosecutors has since spread to others on the team. All three sources noted a long-standing animosity with Bratt’s deputy at the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, Edelstein, who Trump’s team has accused of committing “grand jury misconduct,” the second source said.
In part, the anger stems from how the special counsel’s office questioned a member of Trump’s legal defense team on the stand before a grand jury. It was three days before Christmas 2022, and attorney Timothy Parlatore found himself being asked about his conversations with Trump. Parlatore asserted attorney-client privilege. Edelstein pressed on.
“And if the former president’s so cooperative, why hasn’t he allowed you to share his conversations with the grand jury today?” she asked.
“Are you — are we really doing this?” Parlatore shot back.
Court documents reveal the greater context of that interaction. Prosecutors wanted to question the official custodian of Trump’s presidential records to determine exactly what had been done at Mar-a-Lago to turn over the classified documents. But Trump’s team volunteered Parlatore — setting up a tricky situation that could severely limit what government lawyers could ask. So while Trump’s legal team assured that Parlatore would be “willing” to testify about “where the search was conducted,” the fact that he wore what the court record calls “two hats” meant that he was able to claim all kinds of attorney secrecy privileges — leading to the awkward exchange.
“That was a problem of the former president’s own making. Rather than select a non-lawyer to act as a custodian of records, he selected a lawyer; indeed, a lawyer who represented him personally,” Smith later argued in a June 2023 court filing.
Trump’s lawyers’ anger grew over time; the third source claimed there were “mischaracterizations” in the way Edelstein described investigators’ interactions with witnesses before the D.C. federal judge overseeing the grand jury looking into Mar-a-Lago.
“For us it was just one little glimpse into how they were operating this DC grand jury,” this third source said.
As for Cooney and Gaston, sources who spoke to NOTUS did not point to any particular instance of alleged wrongdoing on their part, but merely noted the enthusiasm they displayed in contributing to Smith’s team and cranking it up into a full-blown criminal investigation.
When asked about Gaston in particular, a second source said, “Nothing specific. She’s a person who was hyperaggressive throughout.”
“You could make a list of people who were pushing it. Cooney and Gaston are definitely in the camp of … ‘Let’s convince others to really turn this into a prosecution.’ It took them a long time to convince people to do that. They were at the front. They were the vanguard. And they followed it to the end,” the first source said.
Trump’s team has grown indignant at what they perceived as the unchecked career ambitions of trial-level prosecutors who eagerly pursued the former president.
“People were doing their jobs,” one source said. “If there was any pushing of the rules, which there was, it involved ambition rather than politics. They weren’t trying to get Trump because they didn’t like his politics. This is a big case, one of the biggest in our country’s history.”
The Trump legal team’s grievances run the gambit. Two sources complained about how the National Archives allegedly wouldn’t allow Trump to exhaust the statutory 30 days to review whether he would assert executive privilege over items in Mar-a-Lago boxes, with one source claiming that Bratt would merely say, “You better do it fast.”
Court records reveal a nuanced situation, in which the Biden administration exercised its right to forgo executive privilege — and Trump failed to sue to stop the process.
There’s also ire over the way prosecutors managed to convince the outgoing chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, Beryl Howell, to give Smith’s team the private notes of Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran — evidence that was used to criminally charge Trump with a cover-up at Mar-a-Lago. That episode turned Trump’s own lawyer into a potential witness against him, which angered the others on the defense team. After all, the notes described how Trump, when faced with a subpoena about his hidden classified records, turned to his lawyers and said, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
The second source also complained about the way prosecutors scored grand jury testimony from high-value witnesses, like Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone and former Vice President Mike Pence, by overcoming objections about executive privilege.
“When Judge Howell would rule that privilege did not apply and the person had to testify, we’d notify everybody that we’d file an appeal. DOJ would then rush these people into the grand jury as quickly as possible, the very next day or even that afternoon. Then they’d move to dismiss the appeal as moot because they already got the testimony,” the second source said. “Is it misconduct? No. They are allowed to do it. But is it best practice? No.”
Then-Chief Judge Howell had a different take in a sealed October 2022 order, where she noted her frustration at the fact that “the grand jury investigation has been stalled by … months given the former president’s invocation of privilege on the eve of the first rescheduled witness testimony.” She called it “an obvious pattern of delay” and said Trump “has only himself to blame for those outcomes.”
Trump has explicitly said he wants revenge. As a presidential candidate, he railed against Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and Smith — once floating the idea of imprisoning them. He also remained aware of the lower-ranking prosecutors, too, referring to them the following month as “these political SleazeBags” and Joe Biden’s “Fascist Thugs.”
While Trump said he wouldn’t direct the DOJ to conduct specific investigations, his nominees for the Department of Justice are on the same page as he is. AG nominee Pam Bondi is a close Trump ally who has specifically threatened reprisals. And two of Trump’s top defense lawyers in these cases — Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, who have accused Smith’s team of misbehavior — are up to be the deputy AG and principal associate deputy AG. If confirmed, they’d oversee the career prosecutors returning to their regular jobs at the Justice Department.
“If I’m walking in as Pam Bondi, I want every communication from the time of that meeting with Stanley Woodward, every text and email, every prosecutor in that room interviewed… a robust investigation, not just an OPR slow walk,” said the third source.
“They should have to answer for it,” this person said.
Solomon Shinerock, a former federal prosecutor who has also investigated Trump for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said any retaliation against Smith’s team will be a challenge.
“You’re going to have to contend with prosecutorial immunity, which is very significant. Very few prosecutors get investigated for work they do in connection with their official duties. And that’s how it should be. Otherwise, you would have them acting like shrinking violets,” said Shinerock, who’s now at the New York law firm of Lewis Baach.
Still, Shinerock cautioned that the mere specter of prolonged internal investigations could be damaging to the DOJ as an institution — and harm morale at the department.
“There are protections that make this whole thing a complete empty promise. It’s atmospherics and posturing. But it’s still effective if your goal is to simply deter others and be a bully,” he said. “In the future, people are going to run scared … it’s a very effective way of undermining your enemy if you’re talking about gangland politics, which is the politics Trump knows.”
—
Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.