The team

Jason Alberts Accompanied prosecutors at the guilty plea of Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney who admitted to lying to investigators probing a report prepared for the Ukrainian government on the trial of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. In court for most Manafort proceedings. Before joining the FBI, Alberts served in the Interior Department solicitor’s office as a political appointee of President George W. Bush. Alberts has undergraduate and law degrees from Arizona State University and teaches criminal procedure in an online class for ASU’s law school. He also organized the New York spinoff of charity run named for Pat Tillman, football player who quit to become an Army Ranger and was killed in Afghanistan. Photo by John Shinkle

Robert Gibbs Filed the court affidavit supporting former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos’ 2017 arrest at Washington’s Dulles Airport as he came off a plane from Germany. In court filings, Gibbs said he’s has been with the FBI since 2003 and has “conducted numerous investigations into complex domestic and extraterritorial crimes, including crimes related to espionage and foreign influence.” In 2009, he led a case against a Pentagon official, Wilbur Fondren, who was accused of selling classified and unclassified information to Tai Shen Kuo, a Taiwan-born U.S. citizen who admitted working for China. Early parts of that case were prosecuted by Aaron Zebley, now one of Mueller’s top deputies on the special counsel probe.

Jennifer Edwards Submitted affidavit last October urging that the Papadopoulos case be kept under seal so FBI could interview “certain individuals who may have knowledge of contacts between Russian nationals…and the [Trump] campaign.” Edwards added that she is assigned to the “Russian interference” part of Mueller probe. A Florida-licensed CPA, she joined the FBI in 2006. Won Attorney General’s award in 2016 for her work on the FBI’s DC-area Child Exploitation Task Force.

Sherine Ebadi Lead agent at Rick Gates’s guilty plea in February. Ebadi was previously a Long Beach, Calif.-based agent specializing in bank, wire, mail, investment and securities fraud, money laundering and identity theft. She investigated Gulfstream accounting chief Marvin Caukin for embezzling more than $10 million from the firm through payments to bogus vendors. The jet manufacturer was apparently unaware he’d previously served more than three years in prison for fraud.

Mueller has remained mum about the FBI contingent supporting his work. His budget report released last December obscured any details on the bureau’s specific contribution. Mueller’s spokesperson won’t even give an overall number of FBI agents on the case, though Mueller’s office willingly confirmed the new attorney hires and the transfers from other Justice Department offices, putting the team of prosecutors on full-time duty at 16. The FBI declined requests to discuss its personnel working for Mueller or their backgrounds.

Two FBI employees — former bureau lawyer Lisa Page and agent Peter Strzok — wound up at the center of a scandal after the release of text messages exchanged between them rooting for Hillary Clinton to win in 2016. Strzok was removed from the Russia team. Page resigned from the bureau earlier this month.

Many of the FBI agents assigned to Mueller’s team have never been publicly identified, although some names have emerged in legal filings or been mentioned by prosecutors in court. Even in the case of those who have been mentioned, the public paper trail is often scant. Some have little or no evident social-media profile.

But members of Mueller’s FBI team have résumés as exotic and high-powered as the prosecutors who capture the limelight.

The agent overseeing the FBI’s squad attached to Mueller’s probe, David Archey, is a Duke Law School graduate who spent time in Rwanda studying the role children played in the genocide there. Archey was brought in to supervise the FBI team after Strzok was removed in 2017.

One of the most experienced members of Mueller’s FBI crew is Meisel, 46, who spent several years earlier this decade in a job involving more international intrigue: as the FBI’s legal attaché in Israel. That overseas experience could be of use in unraveling the complicated set of bank accounts and holding companies in places like Cyprus and the Grenadines that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is accused of using to launder proceeds from his international work. Manafort has pleaded not guilty and faces trial later this year.

The team Omer Meisel Now the lead FBI agent on the Paul Manafort case, he came to the FBI in 1999 after stints as an investigator for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Association of Securities Dealers and was assigned to the FBI’s San Francisco office, where Mueller was then U.S. attorney. Meisel later worked on the Enron case with Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. as well as on the FBI corruption probe of former San Diego Democratic Rep. Bob Filner, who ultimately pleaded guilty to state charges of false imprisonment and battery. Photo by Josh Gerstein

Meisel has been in court for nearly every hearing in the Manafort case, sitting at the counsel table with his longtime associate Weissmann, as well as prosecutors Greg Andres and Kyle Freeny. Meisel also showed up in some widely viewed photos and video on Oct. 30, the day the indictment in the case was unsealed: greeting Manafort and his attorney Kevin Downing as the veteran political consultant arrived to be booked at the FBI’s field office in D.C., then driving him to court a few hours later to be arraigned.

There’s also corruption expert Alberts, 42, who was a political appointee of President George W. Bush in the Department of Interior’s solicitor’s office before signing up with the FBI about a decade ago and becoming a top corruption investigator in the bureau’s New York office.

Alberts’ interview style was captured in an April 2016 security-camera video recording posted online by the Daily News in March, though the paper did not note Alberts’ connection to the Mueller probe. The video, also obtained by POLITICO, shows Alberts questioning the leader of an Orthodox Jewish security patrol in New York City about his business “expediting” issuance of concealed-carry handgun permits.

Alberts used a “prisoner’s dilemma” technique on the suspect, Alex “Shaya” Lichtenstein, suggesting that an associate was talking at the same time elsewhere and implicating him. “If he tells us you gave him cash, you would say he’s lying?” Alberts said. “You’re not the only person that’s going down today. … This is part of a much bigger thing.”

In the video, Lichtenstein says he’s seen the Showtime TV show “Billions” and assumes it accurately portrays what it’s like to be an agent. Not so, Alberts replies. “What you see on TV is not what it’s like in real life. Promise you that,” Alberts says, suggesting the tough-guy approach is rarely useful for the FBI. “I wish that my experience at Quantico was like the one on TV. It’s not. … We’re talking about sophisticated crimes. We’re not talking about dealing with drug pushers and gangbangers. We’re talking about sophisticated people who may or may not have done something wrong.”

Lichtenstein pleaded guilty in 2016 and got a 32-month sentence, which he’s serving at a prison in Miami.

Mueller’s team also includes Domin, 37, a would-be filmmaker and college Russian major who left California and the movie business for a new career at the bureau just a few years ago.

The team Brock Domin Filed court declarations detailing Manafort’s involvement in editing an op-ed being drafted under byline of a former Ukrainian official and also submitted a secret court declaration in a successful bid to force testimony from a lawyer who helped prepare what prosecutors say were false and misleading Foreign Agent Registration Act filings Manafort had sent to the Justice Department. A former high-school wrestler and Russian language and literature major at the University of Notre Dame, Domin got an MBA from Pepperdine University and worked in the movie business—including forming a company to make “an HD action feature about a man who drives himself into a world of trouble”—before joining the FBI as special agent in 2015. Trained in national security investigations and financial crimes. Photo by John Shinkle

Domin’s role in the case went public earlier this year when the FBI agent filed a pair of court declarations detailing how intercepted emails revealed Manafort’s involvement in editing an op-ed being drafted under the byline of former Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Voloshyn. Manafort reportedly denied involvement in writing the op-ed, but Domin’s declarations demonstrated in great detail how Manafort and an aide the U.S. suspects of ties to Russian intelligence, Konstantin Kilimnik, corresponded about various proposed changes to the opinion piece.

Prosecutors used the op-ed episode to try to toughen bail requirements for Manafort. Judge Amy Berman Jackson declined to do that but scolded Manafort for seeking to evade a gag order she issued in the case.

Before Manafort was indicted, Domin also submitted a secret court declaration in a successful bid to force testimony from a lawyer who helped prepare what prosecutors say were false and misleading Foreign Agent Registration Act filings sent to the Justice Department.

Domin’s online biography says that before joining the FBI in 2015 he worked in film production for Warner Bros. and as a consultant for The Weinstein Co., the movie studio that went into bankruptcy earlier this year in the wake of rape and sexual assault allegations against founder Harvey Weinstein.

Despite the white-hot media spotlight, Mueller’s FBI squad continues to work in relative obscurity. Throughout much of the past year, each new prosecutor that reporters managed to identify unleashed a spate of news stories about his or her background, past cases and courtroom style.

On the more dramatic days, the FBI team gathers before dawn to swoop in and carry out search warrants, like the one used to raid Manafort’s luxury condo. They appear, often unexpectedly, to serve subpoenas demanding that witnesses appear before a Mueller-run grand jury. As another witness steps off a plane, they’re waiting to subject them to a carefully planned series of questions or even place the witness under arrest.

As another witness who lives abroad prepared to fly home from the U.S., the agents popped up at the gate unexpectedly. “It was like, ‘We have an eye on you. We know what you’re doing,’” she recalled. “That was the message I got.”

The team Walter Giardina Part of team investigating Flynn, he participated in the Cox interview. Giardina also worked with Barnett on the Montgomery case in 2015. A Marine who served as a convoy commander in the Iraq War in 2003, he is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate. Curtis Heide Lead agent at a secret court hearing in Washington last October where Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Most recently based in Chicago. William Barnett Assigned to team investigating former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. As part of that probe, Barnett interviewed freelance editor Hank Cox, who helped Flynn prepare an op-ed published in the Hill echoing Turkish government views of a dissident cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania. Flynn belatedly disclosed to authorities that the work was paid for by a firm owned by a Turkish businessman with ties to Turkey’s president. In 2015, Barnett debriefed former intelligence agency contractor Dennis Montgomery, who claimed to have information about illegal surveillance being conducted by the Obama administration. David Archey Took over as the FBI’s top man on Mueller’s team after Peter Strzok was removed from the investigation. Before being brought in to supervise the Russia probe, Archey briefly served as the acting special agent in charge of the FBI’s Birmingham, Alabama, office. He also played a walk-on role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, approving some of the initial paperwork to open the probe in 2015. Francesco Corral Supervisory special agent involved in cybersecurity aspects of Mueller’s probe of Russian influence on the 2016 election. Submitted declaration urging sealing of the guilty plea last month of Richard Pinedo, who admitted to facilitating identity fraud by selling bank account numbers to people who turned out to be Russians seeking to affect the 2016 election. Corral has been at the FBI for about a decade, and has handled investigations involving foreign intelligence services’ use of the internet to advance their efforts.

Working side-by-side with prosecutors, agents escort witnesses into Mueller’s secure Washington headquarters to be interrogated. “The two FBI agents were like Joe Friday, just the facts,” said another recent Mueller witness, who said an agent picked him up at a hotel a couple of blocks from Mueller’s office and whisked him in through a garage.

FBI agents do some of the witness interviews themselves, without Mueller’s prosecutors even in the room. Other sessions include both the special counsel’s team and the FBI, witnesses and their lawyers told POLITICO. The agents themselves are then ready to testify if someone is charged with lying to the FBI, as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and Trump campaign official Rick Gates have already have admitted to.

Having FBI agents on hand obviates the need for any prosecutor to testify about what was said, but in the current probe also serves a second purpose: providing someone who could testify even if Mueller’s whole prosecution team were removed and replaced.

Said one former federal prosecutor, who asked not to be named: “If anything happens to the special counsel, the bureau will still be there.”

Darren Samuelsohn and Josh Meyer contributed to this report.