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Meet the all-star team of lawyers Robert Mueller has assembled for the Trump-Russia investigation

Lawyers and legal experts have lauded Mueller's new hires as a powerhouse team of experienced professionals who rank among the best in their field.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

As the investigation into ties between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian officials reportedly plows ahead at a breakneck pace, special counsel Robert Mueller has quietly assembled a formidable team of investigators whose resumés offer a glimpse into potential leads the probe is chasing.

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Mueller's team boasts a storied amount of experience both prosecution and criminal defense, hailing from prestigious law firms like WilmerHale to top spots within various divisions of the Justice Department.

The lawyers, combined, possess a vast array of experience investigating financial fraud, corruption, money laundering, foreign bribery, and organized crime.

And Mueller's team has been on the offensive from the get-go — they have reportedly requested documents regarding some of Trump's most controversial decisions in the White House, and they have doggedly gone after Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, executing a no-knock search warrant in July and even warning that they planned to indict him, according to The New York Times.

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"They are setting a tone. It's important early on to strike terror in the hearts of people in Washington, or else you will be rolled, Solomon Wisenberg, who served as deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation in the 1990s, told the Times. "You want people saying to themselves, 'Man, I had better tell these guys the truth.'"

Mueller's roster of lawyers has earned bipartisan acclaim for their wealth of experience, yet some members have come under fire from conservatives over their previous donations to Democrats. Some critics have even urged Trump to fire Mueller over the hires.

Trump himself has even weighed in:

"You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history — led by some very bad and conflicted people!" Trump wrote on Twitter in June.

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Michael Dreeben

Dreeben, the deputy solicitor general overseeing the Department of Justice's criminal docket, is widely regarded as one of the top criminal law experts in the federal government. He is working for Mueller on the investigation part-time as he juggles the DOJ's criminal appellate cases.

Dreeben is best known for having argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court — a feat that fewer than 10 other attorneys have accomplished in the court's history. Peers say his hiring reveals how seriously Mueller is taking the investigation, and how wide-ranging it ultimately could be.

"That Mueller has sought his assistance attests both to the seriousness of his effort and the depth of the intellectual bench he is building," Paul Rosenzweig, a former Homeland Security official and Whitewater investigator, wrote on the Lawfare blog.

Preet Bharara, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York who was recently fired by Trump, called Dreeben one of the DOJ's top legal and appellate minds in modern times:

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More importantly, Michael D... @ Preet Bharara

Beyond possessing an "encyclopedic" knowledge of criminal law, lawyers who have worked with Dreeben say he also has a gift for anticipating questions his arguments will likely prompt, allowing him to prepare answers accordingly.

"He answers [questions] directly. He answers them completely. And he answers them exquisitely attuned to the concerns that motivated them," Kannon Shanmugam, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly who worked with Dreeben at the solicitor general's office, told the Law360 last year.

Andrew Weissmann

Weissmann joined Mueller's team after taking a leave of absence from his current job leading the DOJ's criminal fraud unit. He formerly served as general counsel to the FBI under Mueller's leadership.

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Weissman also headed up the Enron Task Force between 2002 and 2005, for which he oversaw the prosecutions of 34 people connected to the collapsed energy company, including chairman Kenneth Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling.

He spent 15 years as a federal prosecutor in the eastern district of New York, where he specialized in prosecuting mafia members and bosses from the Colombo, Gambino, and Genovese families.

"As a fraud and foreign bribery expert, he knows how to follow the money. Who knows what they will find, but if there is something to be found, he will find it," Emily Pierce, a former DOJ spokeswoman under the Obama administration, told Politico.

Weissman is one of several attorneys in Mueller's team that has donated to Democrats, although he does not appear to have donated in the 2016 election. He gave $2,300 to President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, and $2,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 2006, according to CNN's review of FEC records.

Jeannie Rhee

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Rhee is one of several attorneys to resign from the WilmerHale law firm to join Mueller's investigation.

She also has two years of DOJ experience, serving as deputy assistant attorney general under former Attorney General Eric Holder. She advised Holder and Obama administration officials on criminal law issues, as well as criminal procedure and executive issues, according to her biography on WilmerHale's website.

As many critics of Mueller's investigation have pointed out, Rhee represented Hillary Clinton in a 2015 lawsuit that sought access to her private emails. She also represented the Clinton Foundation in a 2015 racketeering lawsuit.

Rhee is also one of the members of Mueller's team under scrutiny for her political donations, and has doled out more than $16,000 to Democrats since 2008, CNN reported. She maxed out her donations both in 2015 and 2016 to Clinton's presidential campaign, giving a total of $5,400.

James Quarles

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Quarles is another of Mueller's former WilmerHale colleagues who left the firm to join the special counsel investigation. He is acting as the investigation's point person for communicating with the White House, and has been relaying all of Mueller's requests to the Trump team with increasing frequency, according to The Daily Beast.

Quarles is a well-respected, longtime litigator who served as an assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation early in his career — experience that gives him a significant edge in the Trump-Russia probe, according to colleagues.

"There is nothing comparable to the kind of pressure and obligation that this kind of job puts on your shoulders," Richard Ben-Veniste, one of Watergate's special prosecutors, told CNN. "Having been there before gives [Quarles] the confidence to know how to do it and how to do it right."

Quarles, like other lawyers working on the probe, has also faced scrutiny for donating almost $33,000 to politicians in past years. Although most of the donations went to Democrats — including Obama and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns — FEC records show he has also donated small amounts to Republicans such as Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz.

Aaron Zebley

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Zebley is a longtime FBI staffer who spent years in the counterterrorism division as a special agent before becoming the agency’s chief of staff under Mueller's leadership.

Between FBI stints, Zebley served as assistant US attorney in the national security and terrorism unit. He then moved to the DOJ’s national security division before eventually joining the WilmerHale firm in 2014. He, like Quarles and Rhee, left his job at the firm to work on Mueller’s investigation.

Zebley’s early work at the FBI consisted of grueling, complicated investigations into terrorist groups like Al Qaeda — even before 9/11 propelled the organization into infamy. Yet in recent years at WilmerHale, his focus has turned to cybersecurity.

A recent profile in Wired called Zebley a "dogged FBI agent turned prosecutor turned confidant," noting that his tenacity, history of working alongside Mueller, and globetrotting, investigatory experience will be crucial assets moving into the Trump-Russia probe.

Greg Andres

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Andres joined the investigation on Aug. 1, adding expertise in foreign bribery to Mueller's team.

Andres previously worked at the DOJ between 2010 and 2012, as a deputy assistant attorney general in the department's criminal division. One of the most prominent cases he oversaw was the prosecution of Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford, who ran an $8 billion Ponzi scheme.

He also has chops in prosecuting organized crime, having worked in the US attorney's office in Brooklyn on the criminal cases of several members of the infamous Bonanno family — one of whom was even accused of plotting Andres' murder, according to Reuters.

Most recently, Andres had worked as a white-collar-crime defense attorney for the firm Davis Polk & Wardwell.

Andres told Law360 in a 2016 interview that trial lawyers should always "be confident, straightforward, and well-prepared."

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"Judges, juries, and adversaries can sense a lack of conviction and are unforgiving with respect to overstatement or misrepresentation," he added. "Emphasize the strengths of your case but acknowledge and concede the weak facts or legal precedent. Failing to cite adverse authority or hiding bad facts can be devastating."

Zainab Ahmad

Ahmad is best known for her counterterrorism experience as an assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of New York — an office famed for its work prosecuting organized crime. Yet Ahmad, herself, is best known for successfully prosecuting 13 terrorists since 2009 without sustaining a single loss, according to a recent New Yorker profile.

Ahmad's specialty in prosecuting extraterritorial terrorism cases has meant she has spent much of her time in both American and foreign prisons, interviewing convicted terrorists. One former supervisor told the magazine that Ahmad has likely spend more hours talking to "legitimate Al Qaeda members, hardened terrorist killers," than any other prosecutor in America.

In a 2015 interview with West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, Ahmad said the best way for prosecutors to win over public trust is "to do their job fairly, with an open mind, and with integrity, throughout every stage of the criminal justice process."

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"As prosecutors we are taught over and over that our principal aim is to seek justice, not to achieve any particular subsidiary goal in any particular case," she said.

Aaron Zelinsky

Zelinsky came to the Mueller probe in June after a three-year stint in the US attorney's office in Maryland, where he worked under none other than Rod Rosenstein, who is now the deputy attorney general with authority over the Trump-Russia investigation.

Zelinsky has clerked for Judge Thomas Griffith of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, a George W. Bush appointee, as well as Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice Anthony Kennedy. He also worked for the State Department under the Obama administration, where he dealt with hostage negotiations.

"He is a professional, non-partisan straight shooter, who worked for Democrats at the State Department … but has probably spent more years working for Republicans," former State Department legal adviser Harold Koh, who supervised Zelinksy, told The New Haven Independent.

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"He is an outstanding and fair-minded young prosecutor who will follow the facts and law where they lead. You can count on him to conduct any investigation based on law, not politics."

Kyle Freeny

Freeny is one of the most recently discovered additions to the Mueller probe, joining the team shortly after withdrawing from the Justice Department's highest-profile money-laundering case on June 26, Politico reported.

Freeny had been spearheading the DOJ's effort to seize profits from the film "The Wolf of Wall Street" following allegations that a co-founder of production company Red Granite Pictures, Riza Aziz, had used $64 million worth of stolen assets from the Malaysian government to finance the film. Lawyers for Red Granite Pictures said in a court filing earlier in September that they had reached a settlement with prosecutors.

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As Politico reported, Freeny has drawn criticism in the past when she was one of the lawyers defending the Obama administration from a lawsuit that challenged one of Obama's executive actions on immigration. US District Court Judge Andrew Hanen had accused Freeny and her colleagues of misleading him by incorrectly indicating that none of the changes ordered by Obama had taken effect.

As a result, Hanen was prepared to order extra ethics training for many Washington-based DOJ lawyers and impose sanctions on the government and certain individual lawyers who were not specified. Hanen eventually backed down, however, and accepted that the lawyers' comments he believed to be misleading were "unintentional" and the lawyers "acted with no intent to deceive the other parties or the Court."

Another aspect about Freeny likely to draw ire from Mueller's critics are her political donations to Democrats, which consist of $250 donations to each of Obama's presidential campaigns, and $250 to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, according to Politico.

Andrew Goldstein

Before jumping to the Mueller probe, Goldstein led the public corruption unit in the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, where he worked under Preet Bharara, the federal prosecutor who was famously fired by Trump in March after refusing to resign.

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During his tenure at the Southern District of New York, Goldstein helped prosecute New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, on federal corruption charges. Goldstein also has experience in prosecuting money laundering and asset forfeiture cases, The New York Times reported.

Elizabeth Prelogar

Prelogar is a lawyer on loan to the Mueller probe from the US solicitor general's office. Prelogar is fluent in Russian, according to The National Law Journal, and was a Fulbright scholar in Russia after graduating from Emory College. Prelogar also clerked for Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.

"Like Michael Dreeben, she is a person of superb intellect and deep integrity," former solicitor general Donald Gerrilli, who hired Prelogar in 2014, told The National Law Journal. "She can be counted on to call it as she sees it.

Brandon Van Grack

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Van Grack worked in the US Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he helped prosecute national security, espionage, and international crime cases.

"It would absolutely make sense that a small team like this would want him at their core because of how impossible it is not to get along with him," Josh Geltzer, a former colleague of Van Grack and executive director of Georgetown Law's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy, told The Daily Beast.

Adam Jed

Jed is the only lawyer on Mueller's team to have never worked as a prosecutor, according to The Daily Beast. Instead, Jed has experience as an appellate lawyer in the Justice Department's civil division.

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