To assemble this portrait of Mueller’s FBI team, POLITICO scoured court records, news accounts, press releases and conducted more than two dozen interviews with defense lawyers and witnesses as well as with current and former FBI agents.
The agents who form the core of Mueller’s investigative team – who work mostly from a southwest Washington office complex whose only distinguishing feature may be the network TV camera regularly posted near the entrance – have a wide range of skills, with some specializing in financial frauds, others in counterintelligence or corruption, and still others adept at investigating computer hacking and other forms of cybercrime.
Mueller’s FBI crew appears to be a combination of agents who were already working aspects of the investigation before the former FBI director took over a year ago, either because of their expertise or their location, and a set of volunteers who jumped aboard or were invited to join as the special counsel staffed up.
“The agents come two ways,” said Jeff Cramer, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago, now with Berkeley Research Group. “One is geographic. But, as you’re constructing your perfect investigative team, if you have your druthers and there’s agents you’ve worked with in the past, wherever they are in the country, on a case like this you do reach out and say, ‘Would you like to be involved in this?’”
Those who said yes include Omer Meisel, a former Securities and Exchange Commission investigator who cut his teeth as a young FBI recruit probing the collapse of Enron with Mueller deputy Andrew Weissmann nearly two decades ago.
“He’s one of Andrew’s favorite agents,” said a lawyer who’s worked with both men. Another attorney described Meisel as “one of the smartest, most street savvy, hardworking FBI agents I ever encountered.”
Other agents working on the Trump-Russia probe include Robert Gibbs, who’s worked Chinese espionage cases; Sherine Ebadi, who pursued a multi-million dollar fraud at the U.S.’s biggest corporate jet maker; Jennifer Edwards, an accountant who handled internet crimes against children before joining the special counsel’s team; Jason Alberts, a public-corruption specialist who has handled high-profile cases involving the New York Police Department and the United Nations; and Brock Domin, a novice FBI agent with technology know-how, Russian language skills and experience on the ground in Moscow.