Who Is Jay Bratt?

The other day, the FBI declassified another 266 pages of documents, and almost nobody seems to have noticed.

BREAKING: @FDRLST has obtained the most recent 266-page tranche of declassified FBI documents.

Because we believe in the right of the public to access and analyze these documents in their entirety, we are making the entire file available to everybody.

Link in comments. pic.twitter.com/uSYjyuw0oF

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 13, 2025

I did my best to scroll through them, but with all the redactions, I couldn't get any sense of continuity. Having no choice, I waited for someone else to begin to make sense of everything, but I didn't begin to see much until this morning. Julie Kelly's take is probably the best -- it gives a good impression of the many interfacing pieces:

Lots of the usual suspects—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Peter Strzok to name a few—are popping up in newly-released documents related to the Russiagate hoax. But references to one individual in this week’s disclosure of records in the FBI’s multi-faceted leak investigations once again demonstrate the double standard in how the establishment Department of Justice approached the mishandling of classified information: Jay Bratt.

While Bratt is not specifically mentioned by name in the latest 266-page document dump, the powerful office he ran for six years, the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES), is cited repeatedly.

Wait a moment. Who is Jay Bratt, and why isn't he mentioned? I had only a vague memory that he was a special prosecutor in the Mar-a-Lago classified files case, but he faded from view after the judge dismissed it. Then he briefly popped into view again this past May:

The former special counsel prosecutor Jay Bratt asserted his fifth amendment right not to answer questions during a Wednesday deposition before a Republican-led House committee looking for evidence of politicization in the prosecutions of Donald Trump, a spokesman said.

So, why is he taking the fifth? Back at the link,

Top justice department officials have made clear that they plan to investigate prosecutors who brought charges against Trump during his four years out of office. Two years ago, after Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges related to tampering with its 2020 election result, the now-attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that justice department prosecutors “will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.”

So, even though he's hardly been mentioned, and he definitely hasn't been one of the usual suspects, his spidey sense is apparently telling him to be very, very careful. And his spidey sense has been active for some months. On January 6 of this year, just two weeks before Trump returned to office,

A lead prosecutor on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) prosecution into President-elect Trump’s mishandling of documents at Mar-a-Lago has retired from the department.

Jay Bratt left the DOJ on Friday after 34 years of working for the department, a spokesperson confirmed.

Bratt was a senior national security prosecutor who worked on the Mar-a-Lago documents case in its earliest stages, later working on detail in special counsel Jack Smith’s office.

According to the Julie Kelly story, prior to the Mar-a-Lago business, Bratt was involved in FBI investigations -- "'Foggy Falls' into the Carter Page FISA leak and 'Genetic Christmas' into Russian election hacking claims" -- that now appear to have focused on then-House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff approving committee staff leaking classified information to the press to damage Trump. Bratt

—under his predecessor and then after he took the reins of the office in October 2018—stonewalled requests by the Washington FBI field office (WFO) for help in the Page FISA inquiry. “Since DOJ CES and [the DC US attorney’s office] were not willing to obtain [sentence redacted], WFO exhausted all logical investigative steps to move the case forward and requested DOJ CES and [DC US attorney’s office] to provide WFO with a declination memorandum,” one memo read.

Buit almost immediately after Trump 45 left office,

As the apparent conduit between the Biden White House and the DOJ in concocting the classified documents case, Bratt aggressively pursued the president and his associates starting in early 2021.

Bratt visited Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 along with three FBI agents on a reconnaissance mission disguised as a legit attempt to help Team Trump locate more classified papers to comply with a subpoena in the matter.

Following the visit, Bratt pushed hard to obtain a warrant to search the president’s residence, resulting in the nine-hour armed raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. Bratt was then tasked to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office and took the lead in prosecuting Trump following Smith’s June 2023 criminal indictment in the documents case.

Kelly doesn't mention any direct connection between the new disclosure that Adam Schiff approved leaks of classified information from the House Intelligence Committee to the press to damage Trump and Bratt's apparent actions to deny information about the leaks to the FBI's Washington Field Office and subsequent closure of those investigations. According to that link,

A career intelligence officer who worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for more than a decade repeatedly warned the FBI beginning in 2017 that then-Rep. Adam Schiff had approved leaking classified information to smear then-President Donald Trump over the now-debunked Russiagate scandal, according to bombshell FBI memos that Director Kash Patel has turned over to Congress.

The FBI 302 interview reports obtained by Just the News state the intelligence staffer — a Democrat by party affiliation who described himself as a friend to both Schiff, now a California senator, and former Republican House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes — considered the classified leaking to be "unethical," "illegal," and “treasonous,” but was told not to worry about it because Schiff believed he would be spared prosecution under the Constitution's speech and debate clause.

. . . But officials told Just the News that DOJ officials showed little interest in pursuing Schiff when the allegations were brought to them years ago, citing the very same excuse the lawmaker had offered.

So, was Jay Bratt among the DOJ officials who "showed little interest in pursuing Schiff" when the whistleblower raised the alarm? Where were Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray, for that matter? It can't be much of a surprise, putting these recent developments in context, that Bratt would plead the fifth in an interview with the House Judiciary Committee. Garland and Wray may one day have to do the same.

At minimum, it seems peculiar that the same guy who may have played a role in protecting Adam Schiff from being investigated for leaking classified documents should suddenly develop such a strong interest in whether Trump might have mishandled the same that he wound up being seconded from a high-level DOJ job to being the line prosecutor in the Mar-a-Lago case, at least nominally a demotion.

But it's hard not to think these are just small pieces of an intricate machine, and if Bratt found it first convenient to retire and then prudent to plead the fifth, this may in fact say things about Schiff, Wray, and Garland. I very much doubt this has escaped Bondi and Patel. Certainly Bratt's activities after 2020 could involve Schiff in a continuing conspiracy as well.