Special counsel Robert Mueller is assembling a prosecution team with decades of experience going after everything from Watergate to the Mafia to Enron as he digs in for a lengthy probe into possible collusion between Russia and President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
His first appointments — tapping longtime law-firm partner James Quarles and Andrew Weissmann, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud unit — were the opening moves in a politically red-hot criminal case that has upended the opening months of the Trump White House.
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Mueller brings a wealth of national security experience from his time leading the FBI in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Veteran prosecutors say he has assembled a potent team whose members have backgrounds handling cases involving politicians, mobsters and others — and who know how to work potential witnesses if it helps them land bigger fish.
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Weissmann’s prosecution record includes overseeing the investigations into more than 30 people while running the Enron Task Force, including CEOs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. And while working in the U.S. attorney’s office in the eastern district of New York, he tried more than 25 cases involving members of the Genovese, Colombo and Gambino crime families.
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Mueller’s team will pick up where other probes left off, including an FBI investigation that started last July exploring possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. They’re also taking on the Manafort probe, which The Associated Press reported started in 2014 — before Manafort became Trump’s campaign manager — when federal officials started looking into his work on behalf of pro-Kremlin officials in Ukraine.
Also under Mueller’s purview: The government’s investigation of Flynn, the former White House national security adviser who has come under scrutiny on multiple fronts, including for lobbying on behalf of a Turkish businessman with ties to Russia.
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“In a matter of this importance — it’s going to have an almost unprecedented level of outside scrutiny for anything they do — it’s critical that Mueller would be prizing that kind of gray-beard energy,” [Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Weissmann on the Enron case] said.
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Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, confirmed in an email to POLITICO that the special counsel’s office won’t start from scratch but can “move forward on investigative steps already taken.”
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Veteran prosecutors say Mueller won’t move as quickly as House and Senate committees that have already demanded materials from key Trump associates, including Manafort, Stone, Page and Flynn.
“You don’t go talk to potential targets first,” Zeidenberg said. “They’re at the end. I don’t think they’re anywhere close to that.”
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As they dig, Mueller and his team could find useful evidence in Trump’s personal Twitter feed, which Zeidenberg said is a “gold mine” of time-stamped thoughts and opinions from the president on matters under investigation.
Politico
