The Counterintelligence and Export Control Section at the Department of Justice handles some of the nation’s most sensitive cases — cases like Russian spy operations, China stealing military technology and Americans leaking classified information. But in recent weeks, the 40-lawyer roster has shrunk to 27, with the team losing most of its top lawyers and a prosecutor with no experience on national security cases taking the helm.
“The magnitude of the loss of attorneys in CES is potentially very damaging for the national security of the United States,” said David Laufman, who led the team from late 2014 until early 2018. “There is a steady battle rhythm of counterintelligence threats from a range of notorious bad actors, particularly China, Russia and Iran.”
Laufman added that President Donald Trump’s administration has “crippled” the workforce necessary to combat those threats, “not only at the line-attorney level but by supervisory officials at the front office at the National Security Division, who have developed a fine-tuned judgment over the years about how to use the legal tools available to counter those threats.”
“That type of judgment is irreplaceable at the front office,” Laufman added.
In just over three weeks, CES has had three different chiefs. And there’s now a backlog of espionage criminal cases across the country that require the office’s consultation and approval, according to sources who spoke to NOTUS on the condition of anonymity.
The current leader of CES, Scott Lara, in the words of one source, “was unable to occupy an office” in the secured compartmentalized information facility at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington in the first few days because he initially lacked the top secret clearance to enter his own team’s secured zone.
Faced with questions about the wave of departures, the department’s National Security Division declined to discuss personnel matters but pointed to recent examples of its ongoing work: last week’s conviction of a Navy sailor who spied for China and securing an eight-year prison sentence for a Chinese man who sent weapons to North Korea. (Both of those cases were initially filed during the Biden administration.)
Shannon Shevlin, a DOJ national security spokesperson, noted that “CES works swiftly and collaboratively to advise and assist U.S. Attorneys’ Offices throughout the country, including on charging decisions.”
In a statement, she called the descriptions “uninformed allegations” and said they were “a disservice to the over 220 dedicated national security prosecutors and other attorneys working in the division.”
Part of the churn is over President Donald Trump and his own legal problems. At least three prosecutors were fired because they worked on criminal cases against Trump while he was out of office, according to these current and former DOJ employees. Two other senior NSD officials were reassigned for similar reasons, and several CES prosecutors left when they weren’t able to get approved for remote work. Half-a-dozen others have left either fearing retribution or potential layoffs, these sources said.
This summer, NOTUS obtained internal DOJ documents detailing what one source referred to as a total “brain drain” at CES — one that goes far beyond what the Justice Department has seen as a whole. And in more recent weeks, current and former DOJ employees have expressed grave concerns about the status of the team and its current direction.
Sources have also voiced reservations about the National Security Division’s second-in-command, Sue Bai, who previously worked as a White House lawyer in Trump’s first administration and was accused of mishandling the pre-publication review of John Bolton’s book to avoid it exposing any regulated state secrets.
These sources questioned why Bai allowed her law license to expire in California, where last month she was suspended for not paying her bar dues or taking the required classes — despite the fact that federal prosecutors are regularly inundated with mandatory ethics and professional classes.
One former DOJ employee familiar with the situation told NOTUS that the true extent of the attrition should be viewed in tandem with the simultaneous exodus of FBI special agents who build the cases that this team prosecutes.
This person pointed to the recent departure of Mike Feinberg, who was widely viewed as one of the FBI’s top experts on combatting Chinese espionage until he was pushed out this summer over his personal friendship with a former FBI agent on Director Kash Patel’s public “enemies list,” as featured in the book Patel published in 2023.
“Across the street at FBI, the caliber of agents I’ve seen taking early retirements ... that’s a lot of knowledge leaving the door on what the tactics, techniques and procedures are of these foreign intelligence services,” one source said. “We’re talking decades to rebuild, not a matter of years. And that’s really troubling.”
Since before returning to the White House, Trump has vowed to reconfigure the entire Justice Department in his image, targeting law enforcement employees who worked on any of the investigations against him regarding his first presidential campaign’s interactions with Russia, his involvement with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection or his hoarding of classified documents at his oceanside club in Florida. Trump emphasized the importance of his vision at a rare speech at DOJ headquarters in March, when he complained about the 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and railed against “the lies and abuses that have occurred within these walls,” blaming them for having “persecuted my family.”
But that has a special meaning for the DOJ’s counterintelligence lawyers who have been involved with so many of Trump’s scandals, given their national security implications.
This counterintelligence team played a core role when the Justice Department, just a few months into Joe Biden’s presidency, indicted Trump associate Tom Barrack — an influential businessman who’d overseen the first inauguration, which was riddled with accusations of grift and influence peddling that led to a separate lawsuit and a $750,000 payment. Matthew McKenzie was the counterintelligence team’s deputy chief when he appeared as a prosecutor at Barrack’s trial in 2022, which ended with an acquittal on charges that he’d been illegally lobbying for the United Arab Emirates.
McKenzie left the team in May, ending his decade at the Justice Department.
George Toscas, hailed by several sources as the most knowledgeable counterintelligence prosecutor in the country, left the DOJ after being reassigned to work on “sanctuary cities,” according to these sources.
“Toscas was a living legend and single-handedly possessed more knowledge and experience in the areas of counterterrorism and counterespionage than the rest of the department combined,” a second former DOJ employee said. “We are less safe as a nation without him there.”
Another seasoned espionage prosecutor was Stephen Marzen, who, according to the sources, was fired over his brief reassignment to work with special counsel Jack Smith during the investigation into Trump’s role on Jan. 6 and his unauthorized stockpile of documents at Mar-a-Lago. This second source touted Marzen as “a skilled prosecutor with unimpeachable integrity” who “played a very, very minor role on Smith’s team, and only for a very limited time period.”
Those departures have elicited more departures, with decades of highly specialized experience walking out the door.
“This means there aren’t a lot of folks around to answer questions and brainstorm about the best way to investigate and prosecute these extremely important cases,” this second former DOJ employee said. “There are unique challenges and approaches to how to handle these matters, and specific tactics that we know work and don’t work.”
This source added that these cases often require relationships with the intelligence community, and that “the brain drain in FBI counterintelligence only magnifies the problem.”
“I have no idea who or how the department would handle a major espionage case right now,” the former DOJ employee added. “It’s a real problem.”
Former employees stressed that, until now, judges had shown prosecutors wide latitude in prosecuting foreign agent cases. But an inexperienced team led by a national security rookie leader could turn that upside down, these sources warned, by creating unfavorable court precedent that limits criminal charges in the future.
“You start losing that expertise and charging stuff that isn’t buttoned up. Or you have prosecutors in the field pushing things that aren’t ready and making bad law. That’s bad for decades to come,” the first source warned.
Keeping the bar high for charging these sorts of crimes starts at the top. And until now, the counterintelligence team has usually kept a long-tenured chief.
Jay Bratt, who rose through the ranks inside the team, held the post for years until he joined Smith’s investigation into Trump. He retired shortly before Inauguration Day.His deputy, Jennifer Gellie, was chief of the section until she left on July 18. She was immediately replaced by Scott Bradford, who was nominated the very next week to be Oregon’s U.S. attorney. He, in turn, was replaced earlier this month by Lara, who was until recently a local prosecutor in the “violent and organized crime” section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, the same office where Bai returned to after leaving the first Trump White House.
The federal court system lists Lara as a trial attorney on 155 different cases since he joined the DOJ nearly a decade ago, but none of them dealt with national security charges. One-third of his cases involved drugs and one-fifth involved some type of theft. Sources are questioning why the team is being led by a prosecutor with zero experience on countering sophisticated spy missions from countries like Iran and China.
“Ideally you want someone who is deeply experienced in these statutes to be at the helm to mentor younger staff attorneys and make informed judgments when evaluating how to proceed,” Laufman said.