WASHINGTON — The former top deputy to Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who twice indicted Donald Trump, is expected to announce 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 Trump purged all prosecutors associated with Smith.

In an interview before his announcement, 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,” 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.”

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 Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.”

In that moment, Cooney said, “I realized Americans like me need to stand up.”

Cooney said he was prepared for an onslaught of Republican attacks questioning his record as a nonpartisan federal prosecutor.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the chair of the Judiciary Committee who deposed 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,” Cooney said, noting that he prosecuted not only Trump but also former Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., 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.”

Cooney is expected to present a unique target in a political race, at a time when Smith has said he expects to be indicted by Trump officials acting on the president’s orders.

He worked on two indictments that accused 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.

Cooney described working as 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,” 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, 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, 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.

Cooney plans to run in a district that does not technically exist yet. He will seek a House seat in the 7th Congressional District, which is currently held by Rep. Eugene Vindman, a Democrat. But 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 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, Vindman would move to an adjacent district, and a new, more heavily Democratic-leaning 7th 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.”)

Cooney blamed Trump for touching off the middecade redistricting arms race.

“He’s doing it to expand his rubber stamp and power,” Cooney said. “I support giving Virginians the choice to redistrict.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Annie Karni/Erin Schaff
c. 2026 The New York Times Company