The former top deputy to Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who twice indicted Donald J. Trump, is expected to announce on Wednesday that he is running for Congress in Virginia, pitching himself as the only Democrat who actually prosecuted the president.
J.P. Cooney, a veteran of the public corruption division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, was fired in January 2025, after Mr. Trump purged all prosecutors associated with Mr. Smith.
In an interview ahead of his announcement, Mr. Cooney said he decided to enter the political arena because he wanted to push back against what he described as the democracy-threatening lawlessness of the Trump administration.
“Never has there been a Congress that has been such a weak and ineffective check on a president’s abuses of power,” Mr. Cooney said. “I lie awake every night worrying that Donald Trump does not have the best interests of our country in mind, and that’s a seismic shift in American leadership and politics.”
Mr. Cooney said that the “biggest catalyst” for his decision to run was the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis last month and what he described as “despicable lies slandering him” told by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, when she described Mr. Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.”
In that moment, Mr. Cooney said, “I realized Americans like me need to stand up.”
Mr. Cooney said he was prepared for an onslaught of Republican attacks questioning his record as a nonpartisan federal prosecutor.
Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee who deposed Mr. Cooney last year in his investigation of the special counsel’s office, did not respond to a request for comment about his run.
“My work speaks for itself,” Mr. Cooney said, noting that he prosecuted not only Mr. Trump but also former Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for his role in an international bribery scheme. “When it comes to democracy and the rule of law, I want my children and my community to know exactly where I stand.”
Mr. Cooney is expected to present a unique target in a political race, at a time when Mr. Smith has said he expects to be indicted by Trump officials acting on the president’s orders.
He worked on two indictments that accused Mr. Trump of seeking to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election and of illegally removing reams of highly classified documents from the White House and taking them to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.
Mr. Cooney described working as Mr. Smith’s deputy as a badge of honor, not as a target on his back.
“Jack Smith is being targeted not because of our politics, but because we’ve had the courage and principle to stand up and hold the most powerful man in the world accountable for grave crimes against the nation,” he said.
“I’ve known J.P. for a long time and I think the world of him as a person and as a public servant,” Mr. Smith said in a statement. “He’s a man of integrity who has committed his career to upholding the rule of law, and he’s the model of who our country needs in public service.”
After he was fired from the Justice Department, Mr. Cooney opened a small law firm with a partner, focusing on public corruption after the Justice Department decimated its public corruption unit.
In the interview, Mr. Cooney described himself as so apolitical in his work that when he told friends he was considering a run for Congress, they asked if he would run as a Democrat or Republican.
Mr. Cooney plans to run in a district that does not technically exist yet. He will seek a House seat in the Seventh Congressional District, which is currently held by Representative Eugene Vindman, a Democrat. But Mr. Vindman’s district — like those throughout the commonwealth — would change under a newly drawn political map that Democrats in Virginia have proposed, which still must survive legal challenges and be approved in an April ballot referendum.
That aggressive gerrymander, which could leave Republicans with just one seat in Virginia, is part of the Democratic response to a bid by Mr. Trump and Republicans to redraw congressional districts to gain an edge in their battle to keep control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.
If the Democrats’ proposed map in Virginia survives, Mr. Vindman would move to an adjacent district, and a new, more heavily Democratic-leaning Seventh Congressional District — a lobster-shaped area stretching from the Washington suburbs up north, west as far as the West Virginia border and all the way south to the outskirts of Richmond — would not have an incumbent. (Some Virginians have already begun to refer to the new district as “The Lobster.”)
Mr. Cooney blamed Mr. Trump for touching off the mid-decade redistricting arms race.
“He’s doing it to expand his rubber stamp and power,” Mr. Cooney said. “I support giving Virginians the choice to redistrict.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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