Fired prosecutors who investigated Trump burst back on scene with new anti-corruption firm

A pair of Justice Department prosecutors who lost their jobs after working on special counsel Jack Smith's legal team investigating and charging President Donald Trump are back, having founded a new law firm to take on corruption, CBS News reported on Wednesday.

Smith's two legal cases against Trump, for election conspiracy over the 2020 coup plot and for illegally removing classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago residence, "were dropped when he won reelection in 2024, because under Justice Department policy, sitting presidents are not prosecuted," noted the report.

Soon after this happened, two prosecutors central to these cases, Molly Gaston and J.P. Cooney, "would lose their jobs once Mr. Trump took office in January. They were fired in a Trump administration purge of prosecutors associated with Smith and staff from the Justice Department's Public Integrity section, which has specialized in corruption cases in the 50 years since Watergate."

Gaston and Cooney, who were two of the most experienced public corruption prosecutors at the department, are now heading up a new project: an eponymous law firm that will seek to do much of the work they did in the government, from the outside.

This is seen as necessary, the report noted, because Trump's retribution purges have all but gutted the DOJ's public corruption unit.

"Justice Connection, an organization representing former agency employees, told CBS News it estimates the Justice Department's Public Integrity section has shrunk to just two full time attorneys, down from dozens in recent years," said the report. "Gaston and Cooney told CBS News they will also offer private legal services to clients who are the subject of investigations, including in congressional probes."

"Institutional relationships are crumbling right now," Gaston said to CBS. "It presents an opportunity and a need for the kind of services that we will provide to impartially and independently give advice and guidance."