Meet the Veteran Prosecutors on Special Counsel John Durham's Team

Last week’s indictment of former Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann in a case tied to the 2016 presidential campaign thrust Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe back into the spotlight.

In April 2019, then-Attorney General William Barr tasked Durham, a veteran prosecutor who was then the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, with investigating how the FBI began scrutinizing the Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign in that effort.

In the years since, Durham’s “investigation of the investigators” has reportedly pursued many possible avenues of inquiry, including the actions of senior officials in the intelligence community, leaks of information to reporters, and investigative actions taken by the FBI.

To date, it has not produced evidence of a conspiracy within the government to smear former President Donald Trump and his associates with allegations of Russian connections, the sort of nefarious plot that Trump and his political allies have long claimed was at the heart of the FBI’s Russia investigation and that Durham was about to expose.

Prior to last week, Durham had brought only one case, which was against a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to doctoring an email used to continue surveillance on former Trump adviser Carter Page. Last week, Durham brought a false statement charge against Sussmann related to a 2016 meeting in which Sussmann shared information about purported Trump-Russia ties with the FBI. The indictment alleges Sussmann lied to the FBI lawyer when he claimed he wasn’t sharing the information at the behest of a client. He was actually acting on behalf of a technology executive and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, the indictment alleges.

Sussmann’s lawyers, Latham & Watkins partners Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, have called the charge politically motivated and baseless. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.

In the time since Durham was appointed, he’s assembled a team of veteran prosecutors from at least four different U.S. attorney’s offices who have handled a range of cases, including terrorism, narcotics and charges brought in the wake of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Here’s a look at some of the key members of Durham’s team:

>> John Durham. The leader of the investigation had a storied prosecutorial career in New England. He served for 35 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut, including as head of its criminal division and as a supervisor on a task force investigating organized crime and racketeering. Durham was Connecticut’s U.S. attorney from 2018 until earlier this year, and he served as the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia from 2008 until 2012.

Durham prosecuted several high-profile mob cases in Connecticut and later began scrutinizing long-rumored ties between the FBI and organized crime in Boston. Durham uncovered evidence that the FBI framed four men in a mob-tied murder in order to protect informants for the agency.

In 2008, Durham was appointed to investigate the destruction of videotapes depicting the torture of prisoners at a CIA blacksite facility. The inquiry was later broadened to cover the CIA’s overall use of torture on terrorism suspects after 9/11. No one was charged as a result of that investigation. Durham drafted a report that remains secret.

Durham has enjoyed a reputation as a professional and by-the-book prosecutor, but his conduct since taking over the probe has occasionally raised eyebrows. Durham issued a rare public statement in 2019 publicly disagreeing with the DOJ Inspector General’s finding that the FBI acted appropriately in opening the Russian collusion probe in 2016, triggering allegations of political bias. Durham’s probe has been criticized broadly as an outgrowth of Trump and Barr’s anger at the Justice Department and FBI for investigating the Trump and prosecuting some of his closest associates.

Durham’s former top aide, Nora Dannehy, also a former federal prosecutor in Connecticut, resigned from the probe last year, reportedly at least in part over concerns about political pressure in the run-up to the 2020 election.

>> Andrew DeFilippis. DeFilippis, one of two prosecutors on the Sussmann case, is detailed to Durham’s team from the Southern District of New York, traditionally seen as one of the most aggressive and high-achieving federal prosecutor’s offices in the country.

At SDNY, DeFilippis, a Yale Law School graduate, was on the team that prosecuted Ahmad Khan Rahimi, the man convicted of detonating bombs that injured 30 people in a Manhattan neighborhood in 2016. He was also involved in the prosecution of Ahmed Mohammed el-Gammal, who was convicted in 2017 of helping a New York college student travel to an ISIS camp in Syria.

DeFilippis was tied to the botched prosecution of Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad, a businessman accused of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. The case unraveled after Nejad’s defense attorneys learned of discovery issues including a discussion between SDNY prosecutors about sneaking a previously undisclosed piece of evidence in with a raft of other documents in the middle of the trial. Prosecutors dropped the charges after the scandal broke. The judge in the case called for a prosecutorial misconduct investigation.

DeFilippis’ role in the episode is unclear. He is one of nine prosecutors listed on the case, but he stopped appearing in the docket after April 2019. By the time the trial began in early 2020, his name was no longer appearing on court filings in the case.

>> Michael Keilty. Keilty, a former career prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, is the other prosecutor assigned to Sussmann’s case. Keilty graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and received the Bronze Star in 2004 for his service in Iraq. He served as an assistant U.S. attorney from 2015 until last October, when he joined Main Justice as senior counsel to the deputy attorney general, a role he left in February, according to his LinkedIn profile.

While at EDNY, he was involved in the ongoing prosecution of a former New York City police officer accused of acting as an agent of China.

>> Anthony Scarpelli. Scarpelli is the chief of the violent crime and narcotics section of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, a role he has held since 2018. Scarpelli joined the federal prosecutor’s office in D.C. in 2000 and has remained ever since, except for a year-long stint as first assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Scarpelli was involved in the prosecution of Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who was the first person charged in the Durham investigation. Clinesmith was sentenced to 12 months of probation after Scarpelli had argued for prison time.

Scarpelli has also been assigned the high-profile Jan. 6 case against Julian Khater and George Tanios, who were accused of attacking U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick with a chemical irritant during the Capitol riot. Sicknick later died after suffering a stroke.

>> Neeraj Patel. Patel, a line prosecutor who worked under Durham in the Connecticut federal prosecutor’s office, assisted Scarpelli with the prosecution of Clinesmith.

During his career in Connecticut, Patel has cases against a lawyer who enticed a minor for sex, and a man who hacked numerous iCloud accounts, including those belonging to actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton.