Thomas Windom Is Helping Drive the Investigation Into Trump’s Push to Keep Power

WASHINGTON — As the Justice Department expands its legal investigation into the efforts to maintain President Donald J. Trump in workplace after his 2020 election loss, the important job of pulling collectively a few of its disparate strands has been given to an aggressive, if little identified, federal prosecutor named Thomas P. Windom.

Since late final yr, when he was detailed to the U.S. legal professional’s workplace in Washington, Mr. Windom, 44, has emerged as a key chief in one in all the most advanced, consequential and delicate inquiries to have been taken on by the Justice Department in latest reminiscence, and one which has kicked into increased gear over the previous week with a raft of latest subpoenas and different steps.

It is Mr. Windom, working below the shut supervision of Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s high aides, who’s executing the division’s time-tested, if slow-moving, technique of working from the periphery of the occasions inward, in accordance to interviews with protection attorneys, division officers and the recipients of subpoenas.

He has been main investigators who’ve been methodically searching for info, for instance, about the roles performed by a few of Mr. Trump’s high advisers, together with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, with a mandate to go as excessive up the chain of command as the proof warrants.

That ingredient of the inquiry is targeted largely on the so-called faux electors scheme, wherein allies of Mr. Trump assembled slates of purported electors pledged to Mr. Trump in swing states gained by Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In latest weeks, the focus has shifted from gathering emails and texts from would-be electors in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan to the attorneys who sought to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory, and pro-Trump political figures like the head of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward.

Mr. Windom has additionally overseen grand jury appearances like the one on Friday by Ali Alexander, a distinguished “Stop the Steal” organizer who testified for almost three hours. And Mr. Windom, along side Matthew M. Graves, the U.S. legal professional for the District of Columbia, has been pushing the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault to flip over transcripts of its interviews with lots of of witnesses in the case — spurred on by an more and more impatient Lisa O. Monaco, Mr. Garland’s high deputy, in accordance to folks aware of the matter.

The raid final week on the dwelling of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who performed a key position in Mr. Trump’s effort to stress the division to pursue and again his baseless claims of widespread election fraud, was initiated individually by the division’s impartial inspector normal, since Mr. Clark had been an worker at the time of the actions below scrutiny. So was the apparently related seizure final week of a cellphone from Mr. Eastman, who has been linked by the House committee to Mr. Clark’s push to assist Mr. Trump stay in workplace.

But Mr. Windom has been concerned in nearly all the division’s different key choices concerning the wide-ranging inquiry into Mr. Trump’s multilayered effort to stay in workplace, officers stated.

For all of this exercise, Mr. Windom stays largely unknown even inside the Justice Department, outdoors of two high-profile circumstances he efficiently introduced in opposition to white supremacists when he labored out of the division’s workplace in Washington’s Maryland suburbs.

Mr. Windom’s bosses seem to be intent on preserving his obscurity: The division’s high brass and its press group didn’t announce his shift to the case from a supervisory position in the U.S. legal professional’s workplace in Maryland late final yr, and so they nonetheless refuse to talk about his appointment, even in personal.

That won’t be a nasty factor for Mr. Windom, the newest federal official assigned to examine the former president and his internal circle, a hazardous job that turned lots of his predecessors into targets of the proper, forcing some to exit public service with deflated reputations and inflated authorized payments.

“Don’t underestimate how every single aspect of your life will be picked over, looked at, investigated, examined — you, your family, everything,” stated Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent on the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia till it was found he had despatched textual content messages disparaging Mr. Trump.

“You think: I’m doing the right thing and that will protect you,” added Mr. Strzok, who remains to be bombarded with threats and on-line assaults greater than three years after being fired. “I didn’t appreciate that there were going to be people out there whose sole goal is to totally destroy you.”

Any investigator scrutinizing Mr. Trump, former prosecutors stated, is liable to be marked as an enemy, no matter the nature of their inquiry. “They were out to destroy Trump, and they were members of our, you know, Central Intelligence or our F.B.I.,” Doug Jensen, 42, a QAnon follower from Iowa who stormed the Capitol, stated in an interview with federal authorities, reflecting the views of many right-wing conspiracy theorists about Mr. Strzok and different investigators.

Mr. Windom is overseeing not less than two key elements of the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation of the Capitol assault, in accordance to grand jury subpoenas obtained by The New York Times, and interviews with present and former prosecutors and protection attorneys.

One prong of the inquiry is targeted on a wide array of speakers, organizers, security guards and so-called VIPs who took half in Mr. Trump’s rally at the Ellipse close to the White House on Jan. 6. which straight proceeded the storming of the Capitol. According to subpoenas, this a part of the probe can be searching for info on any members of the govt or legislative department who helped to plan or execute the rally, or who tried to hinder the certification of the election that was going down inside the Capitol that day — a broad web that might embrace high Trump aides and the former president’s allies in Congress.

Mr. Windom’s second goal — mirroring one focus of the Jan. 6 committee — is a widening investigation into the group of lawyers close to Mr. Trump who helped to devise and promote the plan to create alternate slates of electors. Subpoenas associated to this a part of the probe have sought details about Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman in addition to state officers linked to the faux elector scheme.

One of the witnesses he subpoenaed is Patrick Gartland, a small enterprise coach energetic in Georgia Republican politics, who turned apart efforts by Trump supporters to recruit him as a Trump elector in late 2020.

On May 5, Mr. Gartland, who was grieving the latest demise of his spouse, answered his entrance door to discover two F.B.I. brokers, who handed him an eight-page subpoena, signed by Mr. Windom. The subpoena, which he shared with The New York Times, requested him to present emails, different correspondence or “any document purporting to to be a certificate certifying elector votes in favor of Donald J. Trump and Michael R. Pence.”

Mr. Windom’s subpoena sought details about all of Mr. Gartland’s interactions and appended an inventory of 29 names, which represents a street map, of kinds, to his wider investigation in Georgia and past.

It included Mr. Giuliani; Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner; Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump White House aide; different workers members and outdoors authorized advisers to Mr. Trump, together with Mr. Eastman, Ms. Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro; and a handful of Georgia Republicans whose names have been listed on potential elector slates.

At least three of the folks listed on the subpoena to Mr. Gartland — together with David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and Brad Carver, one other occasion official — were served similar documents by Mr. Windom’s group final week, in accordance to folks with information of the scenario.

At least seven others not on the checklist — amongst them Thomas Lane, an official who labored on behalf of Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign in Arizona, and Shawn Flynn, a Trump marketing campaign aide in Michigan — additionally acquired subpoenas, they stated.

Mr. Windom, a Harvard alumnus who graduated from the University of Virginia’s regulation faculty in 2005, comes from a well-connected political household in Alabama. His father, Stephen R. Windom, served as the state’s lieutenant governor from 1999 to 2003, after switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

The elder Mr. Windom, who retired from politics after a failed bid to grow to be governor, was identified for his earthy humorousness: In 1999, he admitted to urinating in a jug whereas presiding over the State Senate chamber throughout a round-the-clock session, fearful that Democrats would substitute him as presiding officer if he took a bathroom break.

His son has a equally irreverent facet, mirrored in humor columns he wrote for pupil publications when he was youthful.

In one in all them, a quick essay for The Harvard Crimson that ran on Presidents’ Day in 1998, he professed to be tired of the front-page presidential investigation of that period, and oblivious to present occasions.

“I know little about President Clinton’s current sex scandal or our country’s troubles with Iraq, and I really do not care that much,” Mr. Windom wrote. “I place much more importance on what I am doing this weekend, why I have not asked that girl out yet or when I am going to have time to exercise tomorrow.”

Mr. Windom’s later profession — starting together with his clerkship with Edith Brown Clement, a conservative choose on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans — belied that flippancy. From the begin, whilst a clerk, he adopted the mind-set of an aggressive prosecutor, writing a law journal article proposing a reasonable loosening of a legal defendant’s Miranda rights.

“Tom was always the go-to guy in the department for the big, important national security cases in and around the Beltway,” stated Jamie McCall, a former federal prosecutor who labored with Mr. Windom to convey down a white supremacist group generally known as “The Base” out of the U.S. legal professional’s workplace in Greenbelt, Md., in 2019.

Mr. Windom’s exhaustive work on two specific circumstances introduced him to the consideration of Mr. Garland’s group. One was the trial of “The Base” in 2020, wherein he creatively leveraged federal sentencing pointers to safe uncommonly prolonged jail phrases for the group of white supremacists. The different was the case one yr earlier than of Christopher Hasson, a former Coast Guard lieutenant who had plotted to kill Democratic politicians.

But his blunt, uncompromising method has, at instances, chafed his courtroom opponents.

During Mr. Hasson’s post-trial listening to, Mr. Windom satisfied a federal choose to give Mr. Hasson a stiff 13-year sentence — past what would usually be given to a defendant pleading responsible to drug and weapons prices — as punishment for the violence he had meant to inflict.

During the listening to, Mr. Windom attacked a witness for the protection who argued for leniency; Mr. Hasson’s court-appointed lawyer at the time — who’s now the Justice Department’s senior pardons legal professional — stated Mr. Windom’s habits was “one of the most alarming things that I have heard in my practice in federal court.”

Mirriam Seddiq, a legal protection lawyer in Maryland who opposed Mr. Windom in two fraud circumstances, stated he was a personable however “inflexible” adversary who sought sentences that, in her view, have been unduly harsh and punitive. But Ms. Seddiq stated she thought he was nicely suited to his new job.

“If you are going to be a bastard, be a bastard in defense of democracy,” she stated in an interview.

Adam Goldman and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.