WASHINGTON — Two years ago, Molly Gaston stepped into the well of a courtroom in the nation’s capital and made history: informing a judge that a federal grand jury had returned a true bill and indicted a former United States president for attempting to overturn his election loss.
Now — nine months after President Donald Trump returned to the White House and his Justice Department fired her and other career prosecutors who worked with former special counsel Jack Smith — Gaston and another of Smith’s top deputies are stepping out on their own.
She and fellow Smith team alum J.P. Cooney rolled out a new law firm this week focused on helping state and local governments fill the void created by the Justice Department’s retreat from public corruption work. Gaston & Cooney PLLC will also represent the targets of criminal and congressional investigations as Trump flexes his ability to use federal law enforcement and his allies in Congress to target his political opponents.
Also this week, Smith’s lawyers informed Congress that he’s ready to re-enter the limelight, telling Trump allies Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that he’d be happy to testify before Congress. But he requested to do so publicly rather than behind closed doors to help combat the “many mischaracterizations” about his investigations into Trump, his attorneys said.
The public emergence of Smith and two of his top deputies comes as Trump has remade the Justice Department, tearing down the wall between the DOJ and the White House with open calls to go after his opponents; pardoning all participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol whom the department had spent years arresting and prosecuting; and firing scores of nonpolitical DOJ and FBI employees.
Smith gave a rare interview earlier this month, saying that attacks on public servants had an “incalculable” cost to the country. He also made an appearance in a video of DOJ alumni supporting fired employees.
Gaston and Cooney told NBC News that none of this — leaving the Justice Department and the relative anonymity of the life of a federal prosecutor to launch a law firm — was part of the plan. They had both expected to stay on at the Justice Department after Trump took office.
In retrospect, it may have been naive, but Gaston said they joked about getting demoted to work on misdemeanor cases in Superior Court in Washington, the low-level positions where many brand-new federal prosecutors start their careers.
They were fired in January. (Gaston and Cooney are challenging their firings, saying they are illegal and violate long-standing civil service protections.)
They chose not to join a big law firm, several of which have agreed to give free legal services to the Trump administration to avoid being targeted by executive orders, which judges later ruled violated the First Amendment.
Initially, they sought to work with universities to launch academic initiatives focusing on public corruption, with Gaston noting that’s what they spent most of their careers working on and were “really passionate about.” But it didn’t pan out.
“There were a lot of schools that were enthusiastic, but also anxious about working with us because of the environment right now,” Gaston said, adding they were unable to secure funding to launch the project.
Cooney said they want to “try and meet this moment,” which they think “is a particularly challenging one for our country in many respects.”
“Specifically in the area of the cost exacted by public corruption and turning a blind eye to it,” he said, there’s a real need for “independent, conflict-free representation and advocacy across many spectrums.”
The firings and departures of federal employees who worked on cases against Trump or the Jan. 6 prosecutions have been celebrated by many MAGA supporters. Current employees wonder if they’re next on the firing list, and those who departed face daunting challenges, including being targeted on social media, a heightened threat environment and a tough job market, with many employers hesitant to draw the Trump administration’s ire.
The campaign against Smith’s team hasn’t let up since Cooney and Gaston left. The Trump administration, just this month, fired FBI special agents and even administrative staffers who worked with Smith’s office. Gaston called the firing of “model public servants ... outrageous” and sad.
“People who load documents into document review platforms were fired for no reason, except that they had worked for — done work for — the special counsel’s office,” Gaston said. “Those were the hardest moments for us in the last nine months.”
Gaston said she has “immense respect” for those still inside the DOJ who continue to follow the facts and the law.
“Career civil servants who are dedicated to doing their jobs without fear or favor — whether it’s judges or career prosecutors or FBI agents, or people who work at HHS and the like — are just now routinely the subject of such vehement personal attacks on social media and otherwise by politicians and public figures who know better,” Cooney said. “It really has no place in a civil society, and we are so inspired by the career civil servants who, under circumstances like that, go to work every day and do their job faithfully under the law and without fear or favor.”
