A Department of Justice lawyer who is part of the team investigating President Donald Trump’s enemies once represented rioters who stormed the Capitol and compared the criminal cases against them to the Holocaust.
Attorney Jonathan Gross was hired in June to work with the Justice Department’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division.
It turns out, though, that he has since joined the Trump administration’s “weaponization working group,” which has targeted officials who previously investigated the president, NPR reported.
Gross is a former rabbi turned civil litigation attorney who was “outraged” when the government began prosecuting people who participated in the deadly attack on Jan. 6, 2021, he said during a podcast interview unearthed by NPR.
He decided he wanted to represent them, despite not having any experience in criminal law.
“These prosecutors are evil people,” he said during a January YouTube livestream. “They will put you on a cattle car to Auschwitz without batting an eye. I will tell you, some of them were scarier than others. The scariest ones of them are cold-blooded killers.”
During the interview, Gross claimed that junior prosecutors were assigned to the cases, which he argued was evidence that the prosecutions were so “boilerplate” that the DOJ was using them “as a training simulation for new attorneys.”
“Imagine a medical school that says, ‘We’re going to make somebody sick so that a junior can operate on them,’” he told America’s Untold Stories host Mark Groubert during the livestream.
“Well, it’s like Mengele bringing in doctors from a medical school in Frankfurt to watch his procedures on Jews at Auschwitz,” Groubert replied, referencing the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who was dubbed the “Angel of Death” for experimenting on concentration camp prisoners.
“Exactly! It’s exactly what this is. It’s no different,” Gross said.
In a separate podcast interview earlier this year, he claimed that “honestly, there weren’t” any serious violent rioters who stormed the Capitol that day.
This despite the fact that one of his clients was convicted of tackling and pepper-spraying police officers, leading to a 12-year prison sentence, and another of breaking into former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office with a stun gun.
A third pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers in the Capitol Tunnel, which prosecutors said was the site of some of the worst violence against law enforcement.
Trump pardoned all three on his first day back in office as part of a blanket pardon of about 1,500 Capitol defendants.
A DOJ spokesperson did not respond to NPR’s request for comment. Reached by phone, Gross hung up on the reporters and did not respond to text messages.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the DOJ as well.
The department’s weaponization working group is headed by Ed Martin, who was put in charge in May after his nomination for the top U.S. attorney post in Washington, D.C., fell through. He, too, spent years defending and even raising money for Jan. 6 defendants.
One of those pardoned defendants, Jared Wise, who encouraged the mob to kill police officers, serves as a counselor to Martin.
Attorney General Pam Bondi formed the group in February to review “politicized” actions against Trump.
It has since gone after Democratic lawmakers who participated in congressional investigations and prosecutors like New York Attorney General Leticia James who brought cases against the president.
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