The White House counsel’s office met with a top aide to Special Counsel Jack Smith just weeks before he brought charges against former President Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents — raising serious concerns about coordinated legal efforts aimed at President Biden’s likely opponent in 2024.
Jay Bratt, who joined the special counsel team in November 2022, shortly after it was formed, took a meeting in the White House on March 31, 2023, with Caroline Saba, deputy chief of staff for the White House counsel’s office, White House visitor logs show.
They were joined in the 10 a.m. meeting by Danielle Ray, an FBI agent in the Washington field office.
Nine weeks later, Trump was indicted by Smith’s office on June 8, 2023.
Bratt, 63, also met with Saba at the White House in November 2021, when Trump was mired in negotiations with the National Archives, who were demanding the return of presidential records from his Mar-a-Lago estate before a formal investigation had not yet been opened.
Saba, who is not an attorney, left the White House in May to attend law school.
Bratt had a third meeting in the White House in September 2021, this time with Katherine Reily, an advisor to the White House chief of staff’s office.
The logs offer no information about what was discussed at the meetings.
Critics and legal experts questioned why Bratt was taking meetings at all with the White House counsel’s office while part of an active investigation into President Biden’s likely 2024 Republican opponent.
“There is no legitimate purpose for a line [DOJ] guy to be meeting with the White House except if it’s coordinated by the highest levels,” said former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a one-time top federal prosecutor in the Southern District.
When asked if he believed the White House and special counsel were coordinating the prosecution of Trump, Giuliani said: “You’re damn right I do.”
“What’s happening is they have trashed every ethical rule that exists and they have created a state police. It is a Biden state prosecutor and a Biden state police,” he continued.
The former mayor, who represented Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2018 probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, was indicted last week in Fulton County, Georgia in connection with attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the March meeting was particularly troublesome and “raises obvious concerns about visits to the White House after [Bratt] began his work with the special counsel.”
“There is no reason why the Justice Department should not be able to confirm whether this meeting was related to the ongoing investigation or concerns some other matter,” he said.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, said Bratt was at the White House for a “case-related interview” but declined to comment further.
The FBI declined to comment.
A person with knowledge of the 2023 visit insisted that it was “an interview of a career official who was also working at the White House during the Trump Administration.”
The same individual said the 2021 visits were “national security related.”
Bratt, a Harvard-educated attorney, is a longtime Department of Justice hand and has served as chief of its counterintelligence and export control section in the national security division since October 2018.
The section focuses on investigating and prosecuting cases affecting the national security and foreign relations of the United States.
In this capacity, Bratt visited Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 to inspect storage facilities at the property and personally interacted with Trump.
He later became a leading advocate for the unannounced FBI raid of the property in August of that year, the Washington Post reported.
Stanley Woodward, a lawyer for Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta — who has also been charged by the special counsel’s office — accused Bratt in June of trying to coerce his client’s cooperation by floating Woodward’s past application to be a judge.
In a sealed filing obtained by The Guardian, Woodward alleged that Bratt floated his past judicial application to suggest it might be looked at more favorably if his client were to cooperate with the government against Trump.
Bratt is not the only Department of Justice connection to a Trump indictment.
Another longtime Department of Justice official, Matthew Colangelo — freshly hired in December 2022 into the office of Manhattan’s far-left District Attorney Alvin Bragg — also played a critical role in Trump’s indictment in New York City for alleged hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
