![]() Some have little or no evident social-media profile. Even in the case of those who have been mentioned, the public paper trail is often scant. Many of the FBI agents assigned to Mueller’s team have never been publicly identified, although some names have emerged in legal filings or been mentioned by prosecutors in court. Page resigned from the bureau earlier this month. ![]() Two FBI employees - former bureau lawyer Lisa Page and agent Peter Strzok - wound up at the center of a scandal after the release of text messages exchanged between them rooting for Hillary Clinton to win in 2016. The FBI declined requests to discuss its personnel working for Mueller or their backgrounds. Mueller’s spokesperson won’t even give an overall number of FBI agents on the case, though Mueller’s office willingly confirmed the new attorney hires and the transfers from other Justice Department offices, putting the team of prosecutors on full-time duty at 16. His budget report released last December obscured any details on the bureau’s specific contribution. Mueller has remained mum about the FBI contingent supporting his work. The jet manufacturer was apparently unaware he’d previously served more than three years in prison for fraud. She investigated Gulfstream accounting chief Marvin Caukin for embezzling more than $10 million from the firm through payments to bogus vendors. Ebadi was previously a Long Beach, Calif.-based agent specializing in bank, wire, mail, investment and securities fraud, money laundering and identity theft. Lead agent at Rick Gates’s guilty plea in February. Other agents working on the Trump-Russia probe include Robert Gibbs, who’s worked Chinese espionage cases Sherine Ebadi, who pursued a multimillion-dollar fraud at the U.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. Another attorney described Meisel as “one of the smartest, most street savvy, hardworking FBI agents I ever encountered.” “He’s one of Andrew’s favorite agents,” said a lawyer who’s worked with both men. 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. 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?’” “The agents come two ways,” said Jeff Cramer, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago, now with Berkeley Research Group. 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 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. ![]() ![]() To assemble this portrait of Mueller’s FBI team, POLITICO scoured court records, news accounts and press releases and conducted more than two dozen interviews with defense lawyers and witnesses as well as with current and former FBI agents.
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