By Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A lead prosecutor on the criminal case accusing Donald Trump of illegally holding onto classified documents has left the U.S. Justice Department ahead of the president-elect’s return to office, a department spokesperson confirmed on Monday.
Jay Bratt, a senior national security official at the department who was detailed to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office, retired from the department on Friday.
Trump, who is set to return to the presidency on Jan. 20, and his allies have vowed to investigate political opponents and others who have leveled allegations of misconduct against him.
His departure comes as Justice Department lawyers, particularly those involved in investigations into Trump over the documents and his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, weigh their future in a second Trump administration.
Trump has vowed to pardon at least some of the more than 1,600 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by his supporters and has suggested that former Representative Liz Cheney, the lead Republican on a congressional panel that investigated the riot, should face an investigation.
Bratt, 65, played a pivotal role in the investigation into sensitive national security documents that Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago residence and social club following the end of his first term as president in 2021. Bratt was not immediately available for comment.
His departure was previously reported by the website SpyTalk.
The investigation led to a court-approved FBI search of the Florida club in August 2022 that turned up about 100 classified documents and enraged Trump and his supporters.
Bratt joined Smith’s office when the special counsel took over the investigation and helped secure an indictment accusing Trump of knowingly keeping the documents and obstructing U.S. government attempts to retrieve them.
Trump pleaded not guilty and argued that the case, and other criminal cases against him, were politically motivated attempts to damage him and his political movement.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee, dismissed all charges in July 2024 after finding that Smith was improperly appointed as special counsel.
Prosecutors had appealed the ruling, but dropped their bid with respect to Trump after his election win. They signaled that they will seek to revive the case against two Trump associates, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who were accused of obstructing the probe.
Bratt and others in Smith’s office formally handed the appeal to federal prosecutors in south Florida late last month.
Bratt was the subject of a misconduct complaint brought by a lawyer defending Nauta, Stanley Woodward, as part of a bid to dismiss the charges. Woodward accused Bratt of raising his pending application to be a local judge in Washington, D.C., during a 2022 meeting, part of what Woodward claimed was an attempt to coerce Nauta to cooperate with the government.
Prosecutors denied anything improper occurred and said that Bratt raised Woodward’s application as a professional courtesy, according to court documents.
Bratt spent decades in the Justice Department and most recently led a section focused on counterintelligence and export control cases.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone, Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Porter)
