Wasn’t Worth It: Trump’s Classified Documents Prosecutor Jay Bratt Who Ordered Swat Raids With Shoot-to-Kill Orders Resigns
A Department of Justice bureaucrat who insisted on a SWAT-style raid with shoot-to-kill orders at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has retired.
Jay Bratt has worked with the DOJ for over three decades and was staring directly at a potential humiliating termination by Trump’s incoming Attorney General Pam Bondi.
In 2018, during Trump’s first term in office, Bratt rose to the rank of a counterintelligence and export controls chief before joining Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team, which prosecuted Trump for handling classified documents at his private residence. Trump has pleaded not guilty and claims that the case is politically motivated, requesting its dismissal.
Smith previously announced he would retire before Trump took office on January 20 and fired him within seconds as he promised. Bratt’s deputy prosecutor, Julie Edelstein, will also retire with the rest of the witchhunt team. FBI Director Chris Wray is also packing ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
Trump’s witchhunt prosecutor says it’s not worth it defending his position.
While Bratt could stay on and fight his termination like FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in costly legal battles, a source familiar with the matter told SpyTalk that the disgraced prosecutor said fighting to retain his position “wasn’t worth it.”
McCabe, a prosecutor in Trump’s debunked Russian collusion prosecution, was terminated by Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions and denied his pension. However, McCabe challenged the decision as politically motivated, and the courts sided with him.
“They’re forcing him out. There isn’t any doubt that, like Wray, he’s leaving to get ahead of the axe,” said a DOJ official who attended Bratt’s farewell party.
A history of hating Trump.
Bratt, 65, pushed for a search warrant at Trump’s residence after learning that employees might have been moving boxes that had not been returned.
However, according to David Rhode’s book Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI and the War on Democracy, top FBI agent Steven D’Antuono, who oversaw the case, thought that the move was overly aggressive. FBI’s D’Antuono’s advice was overruled, and Trump’s residence was raided, resulting in the recovery of 102 documents.
According to NBC News, the DOJ’s national security team and the FBI’s Washington field office clashed over the issue, with “tension and debate between prosecutors and agents” being routine during the investigation.
Bratt also allegedly influenced Stanley Woodward to testify against Trump by promising him that the Biden administration would view him favorably for a judgeship position, warning him you “wouldn’t want to do anything to mess that up.”
Woodward was representing Walt Nauta, a co-defendant in Trump’s classified documents case.
Meanwhile, bureaucrats continue to decry the mass exodus of “seasoned government lawyers and FBI agents” afraid of Trump’s “retribution.” Nonetheless, the departure of such individuals would simplify the process of ridding Washington, D.C., of career bureaucrats who direct policy.
I hope that arrogant clown Bratt gets his butt nailed to the wall for what he did.
He needs to be publicly flogged and used as a lesson and deterrent for not using common sense, and allowing his personal feelings mis-guide his actions. SHAME.
I hope that merely retiring will not protect these creeps from justice. If a thief promises not to steal any more, is he off the hook for past thefts?