MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There is a new hire at President Trump's Department of Justice. He is a lawyer who represented multiple January 6 Capitol riot defendants. He's now working on an investigation into what the administration calls the alleged weaponization of law enforcement. NPR has learned that this attorney compared the January 6 prosecutions to the Holocaust. NPR investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach is with us now to tell us more about this. Good morning, Tom.
TOM DREISBACH, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So tell us about this attorney.
DREISBACH: Well, his name is Jonathan Gross. At various points, he's represented some of the more high-profile Capitol riot defendants, like Richard Barnett. You might remember Barnett as the guy who posed for photos with his feet up on a desk in Nancy Pelosi's office during the riot. Gross also represented multiple defendants who were convicted of assaulting police.
But Gross was kind of an unusual presence in these cases. He was actually a rabbi for more than a decade before becoming a lawyer in 2019 as a second career. And before January 6, he had never actually practiced criminal law in his life. He decided to take on these cases because he said he was outraged by the prosecutions. And in the process, he has said some really inflammatory things about these prosecutions.
MARTIN: Yes. I mean, you found that he compared the prosecutions to the Holocaust. But can you tell us what was the context there?
DREISBACH: Yeah. So back in January, before he joined the administration, he went on this YouTube livestream. He was ecstatic over Trump's mass pardons for the January 6 defendants. He compared it to Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt in the Bible. But Gross called for consequences for the January 6 prosecutors. The host of the livestream then compared the prosecutors to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Gross responded that's exactly what this is, it's no different. And then Gross said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JONATHAN GROSS: These prosecutors are evil people. They will put you on a cattle car to Auschwitz without batting an eye.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Absolutely.
GROSS: I will tell you, some of them were scarier than others. The scariest ones of them are cold-blooded killers.
DREISBACH: Gross has also said that the government should provide reparations to January 6 defendants. He promoted conspiracy theories that federal agents actually instigated the riot. And he said the investigations into January 6 were worse than the violence on that day itself.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GROSS: The real crime of January 6 was not what happened on that day. It's what happened since.
DREISBACH: Then in June, Gross joined the Trump Justice Department in the Civil Rights Division. And he is working, as we said, on this weaponization group that is essentially investigating the investigators.
MARTIN: The Civil Rights Division. Huh. OK. So you've been talking with former January 6 prosecutors, many of whom were fired because of their work. What are they telling you?
DREISBACH: They're outraged. They say they stand by their work, which they saw as getting justice for the 140 police officers who were injured, really taking a stand in their view against political violence. Mike Gordon is one of those prosecutors I spoke to. He's actually suing the government over his firing. And he told me that hiring someone like Gross sends a bad signal.
MIKE GORDON: That what this weaponization - so-called weaponization working group is doing is actually weaponizing the government against its own employees.
MARTIN: Has the Justice Department commented on what Gross said?
DREISBACH: They did not respond to our request for comment. I did call Jonathan Gross, but he hung up the phone as soon as I identified myself. And I will say that overall, this is just another sign of the rewriting of January 6 history by the Trump administration. As we've reported, another member of that weaponization working group is a former January 6 defendant, Jared Wise, who actually urged rioters to kill cops who were protecting the capitol. Trump dismissed his case when he took office, issued pardons to these defendants. And Jared Wise is now at the DOJ as well.
MARTIN: That is NPR investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach. Tom, thank you.
DREISBACH: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE ALBUM LEAF AND JIMMY LAVALLE'S "PLAY WITH ME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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