From DOJ to Ballot Box: The Rise of Lawfare Candidates

Although the fate of Virginia’s 7th Congressional District remains unclear – a state judge immediately blocked the measure, and the issue is expected to end up before the Supreme Court – Cooney’s candidacy represents a small but growing wave of former prosecutors who are running on their anti-Trump bona fides. So far, at least two other former Justice Department officials are seeking office by touting their work against the president, his supporters, and his current administration. All are running as Democrats.

To their supporters, these candidates represent a principled stand against what they see as the lawless excesses of the Trump administration. To many Republicans, the entry of supposedly neutral federal prosecutors into the brass knuckle world of politics confirms their suspicions that the DOJ is filled with partisans who used their power to target the president and the MAGA movement in general. 

Ryan Crosswell, who is running for Congress as a Democrat in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District, resigned from his position as an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York last year, after the Justice Department sought to drop the indictment against then New York City Mayor Eric Adams on corruption charges. Crosswell’s superiors decided the case should be dropped over evidence suggesting the Biden DOJ had targeted the mayor because he was a vocal critic of the administration’s immigration policies.

In what has become a popular tactic by anti-Trump DOJ lawyers, Crosswell issued a public resignation letter: “I cannot fathom how anyone would do this to the public servants he is supposed to be leading. And the damage done was not limited to two offices – it appalled prosecutors throughout the Department and our alumni.”

In his video announcement, Crosswell showed a clip of Trump walking into a courthouse (followed by now acting Attorney General Todd Blanche) and denounced the president for forcing prosecutors to “drop a case against one of his friends.” (It is unclear whether Adams is actually a “friend” of Trump’s.)

In Minneapolis, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Le is using her opposition to Trump’s immigration policies in her bid to replace another fierce Trump critic, Rep. Ilhan Omar, in the Democratic primary. Le gained national attention in February when she had a meltdown before the judge. “What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need,” Le said, referring to the DOJ’s overwhelming caseload. Le also told the judge, “We have no guidance or direction on what we need to do.”

Impeccable Anti-Trump Credentials

Le was quickly fired. She told the Washington Post that “she had never voted for Trump and opposed his brash enforcement style.” While Croswell and Le are hoping their anti-Trump credentials will help usher them into office, their record of resistance pales in comparison to Cooney’s, whose record of anti-Trump activity goes back a decade. 

Cooney – a Notre Dame grad where he served as the president of the College Democrats club before earning a law degree at the University of Virginia – launched his campaign in a crowded field by boasting about his key role in several anti-Trump prosecutions pursued by Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith between 2021 and 2025. After Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith as special counsel in November 2022, Cooney became his top deputy in the DOJ’s Jan. 6, 2021-related indictment against the president in Washington. They pushed for a quick trial before Election Day. Cooney also successfully sought a gag order against the president one year before the 2024 presidential election, banning the president from making any public statements about potential witnesses in the case, which included former administration officials such as Vice President Mike Pence and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who were at the time criticizing Trump’s plan to again run for office.

Cooney, then chief of the fraud and public corruption section of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, drafted the initial plan for how the DOJ could pursue Trump, as well as several figures and organizations who had participated in the events of Jan. 6. But Cooney’s plan was so aggressive, according to a 2023 Washington Post article, that it alarmed top FBI and DOJ officials and was immediately scuttled.

Trump fired Cooney shortly after Inauguration Day.

The J6 case against the president was dropped after Trump won the 2024 election, but Cooney wants to finish the job. “We have the evidence to convict this president,” Cooney said, pointing to the White House, in one social media post. “That justice can still come.” Cooney also insists that if Trump hadn’t “escaped trials by winning the election,” the president right now “would be in prison.”

“Cooney was the mastermind of the J6 case against the president,” John Lauro, the president’s trial counsel in the J6 case in Washington, told RealClearInvestigations. “Smith and Cooney used the sacred powers of the DOJ against Trump and political movement. Now we see the ultimate fruition of that with Cooney running for office as a far left Democrat and to use his experience as a persecutor against Trump to get an advantage in the far left wing of the Democratic party.” 

Jack Smith Endorsement

Jack Smith is endorsing his longtime colleague – the pair worked together at the Obama DOJ’s public integrity unit – calling Cooney “a man of integrity who has committed his career to upholding the rule of law, and he’s the model of who our country needs in public service.”

The president and congressional Republicans disagree. Cooney is currently the subject of both House and Senate investigations for allegedly abusing his authority at the DOJ to pursue Trump and his allies. During an April 21 hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley accused Cooney and other former Biden DOJ officials of “literally trying to destroy” the country; Grassley, an Iowa Republican, released an extensive trove of text messages and emails between Cooney and Molly Gaston, his co-counsel in the J6 case against Trump.

Immediately following the events of Jan. 6, Cooney worked with Gaston to also investigate a handful of Republican House members for allegedly conducting “reconnaissance tours” on Jan. 5. That accusation was made by then Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherill, now the governor of New Jersey. Sherill claimed groups of individuals, some perhaps tied to Republican lawmakers, were walking inside the Capitol the day before the protest in an effort to scope out the building.

In a Jan. 16, 2021, text to Gaston, Cooney said he believed the “tour/map thing has legs.” He stated that Sherill’s allegations “made perfect sense” to him. “I am fairly confident that we are going to put a map or some other information relevant to coordinated activity in the hands of an extremist group and trace it back to a congressional office.”

Gaston replied, “yep.” A week later, the FBI Washington field office opened “Operation Rampart Twelve” to investigate Sherill’s accusations; the inquiry initially focused on Reps. Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar based on groups of individuals walking near each representative on Jan. 5, 2021. (Sherril also made a similar allegation against Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who was cleared by Capitol Police after a separate investigation.)

FBI headquarters closed “Operation Rampart Twelve” a year later, after finding no evidence to support Cooney’s claims.

Cooney’s anti-Trump fingerprints stretch from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to “Arctic Frost,” the Biden DOJ’s investigation into Trump and hundreds of Republican organizations, donors, and officeholders for the so-called “fake electors” plan. Emails released last year by Grassley’s committee showed Cooney’s central role in obtaining the toll records of several Republican members of Congress related to the probe.

“It’s impossible to buy Democrats’ claim that Arctic Frost was a nonpartisan, by-the-book investigation when Jack Smith’s top henchman is now openly campaigning as a Democrat and running on a platform of impeaching President Trump,” a spokesperson for the Senate Judiciary Committee told RCI. “Cooney’s campaign is saying the quiet part out loud. Arctic Frost was never about justice – it was always about using the federal justice system to take down President Trump and the Republican Party. Thanks to Chairman Grassley’s oversight, which has exposed the Biden administration’s internal records, Americans are seeing the dark reality of the weaponized Arctic Frost investigation.”

But three ongoing federal criminal investigations into the president, a year before the 2024 election, were not enough for Cooney. A few months before Smith handed down his first indictment against the president in Florida for allegedly taking classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, Cooney wanted to open yet another line of inquiry into Trump’s involvement in a song produced by the so-called “J6 Prison Choir,” a group of inmates detained at a special prison in Washington. Cooney wanted to know whether Trump was profiting from sales of the song. “Can we do some work on this to nail down Trump’s role in this?” Cooney wrote to his colleagues at the special counsel's office in March 2023, referring to a Forbes article about the project.

“The special counsel’s team was filled with inbred ideologues,” Lauro said 

Excessive Sentences, False Rumors

After longtime Trump confidant Steve Bannon was found guilty by a D.C. jury in 2022 on two counts of contempt of Congress, Cooney sought excessive prison time for Bannon’s refusal to cooperate with the Select January 6 Committee. He filed a 24-page sentencing memo for two misdemeanors that are rarely, if ever, prosecuted in the nation’s capital; he asked Judge Carl Nichols to send Bannon to prison for six months and pay a $200,000 fine. “The rioters who overran the Capitol on January 6 did not just attack a building – they assaulted the rule of law upon which this country was built and through which it endures. By flouting the Select Committee’s subpoena and its authority, [Bannon] exacerbated that assault,” Cooney wrote.

Nichols sentenced Bannon to four months in prison and imposed a $6,500 fine.

It was another sentencing request in a separate Trump-related case that offended both the DOJ’s inspector general and House Republicans. Cooney was part of the government’s team prosecuting Roger Stone, a longtime Trump associate, for allegedly interfering in the bogus Russia collusion investigation. Just like Bannon, Stone was found guilty by a D.C. jury of all charges, including obstruction and making false statements.

Cooney attempted to throw the book at Stone, asking for a sentence of between seven and nine years in prison. But the following day, Cooney’s boss at the office, who had already sparred with Cooney over what he saw as an excessive sentencing request, filed a separate sentencing recommendation, informing Judge Amy Berman Jackson that the initial memo “does not accurately reflect the Department of Justice’s position on what would be a reasonable sentence in this matter.” 

That prompted Cooney, according to then-DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, to start rumors claiming President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr had intervened to help Stone obtain a lower sentence. A report issued in 2024 by Horowitz, following an extensive investigation into the Stone sentencing controversy, “did not identify documentary or testimonial evidence that the actions and decisions of those involved in the preparation and filing of the first and second sentencing memoranda were affected by improper political considerations or influence.” House Judiciary Chairman James Jordan subsequently opened a congressional investigation into Cooney’s false claims of political interference in the matter.

Attempts to reach Cooney’s and Crosswell’s campaigns were unsuccessful. Despite repeated requests, a DOJ spokeswoman declined to comment on their candidacies.

Cooney’s years-long pursuit of the president and everyone around him, Lauro insists, helped Trump get elected in 2024. “Because of [Cooney’s] efforts, President Trump won the presidency. So he was terrific for the president and the MAGA movement in that regard.”

Still, Cooney’s anti-Trump legacy may not be finished yet. If Cooney wins his Virginia race and Democrats retake the House in the fall midterm elections, the former prosecutor could play a central role amid reports that his party is already planning to impeach Trump.