Andrew Goldstein speaks at the New York City Bar on Tuesday, June 7, 2017. (Photo: David Handschuh/NYLJ)

Andrew Goldstein, one of Special Counsel Robert Mueller III's lead prosecutors, has joined Cooley as a litigation partner in the firm's white-collar practice, dividing his time between Washington, D.C., and New York.

“Working on the Mueller investigation was the privilege of a lifetime,” Goldstein said. “Bob is an extraordinary public servant and he created an environment in our office where our only mission was to do the right thing, to do it for the right reasons, and to do it as quickly as possible, and I am enormously proud of the work that we did.”

Within the larger special counsel investigation, Goldstein took a lead role in investigating whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice. He spent dozens of hours questioning former White House counsel Donald McGahn and imprisoned fixer Michael Cohen, according to reporting by The New York Times.

Goldstein said he's not sure precisely how he'll split his time between New York and D.C. at his new firm, but he noted that his family lives in Washington, and his goal is to help strengthen Palo-Alto-based Cooley's East Coast litigation practice in both cities.

Before joining Mueller's team, Goldstein was chief of the public corruption unit for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, under then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. At SDNY he led corruption investigations into New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's aides, the New York City Police Department, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, among many others.

“Andrew is an exceptionally talented lawyer and a natural leader who has succeeded in every role he has taken on,” Mike Attanasio, chairman of Cooley's global litigation department, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to have him join our thriving white collar practice and global litigation team.”

Goldstein became familiar with Cooley's lawyers while working in the U.S. Attorney's Office, he said, and later became impressed with its “cutting-edge litigation on behalf of cutting-edge clients.”

“I was enormously impressed by their talent and, just as important, I found the Cooley lawyers to be good, fun people with great integrity and so I am thrilled to have the opportunity to be able to work with them,” Goldstein said. “I can't think of a better way for me to be reentering private practice.”

He declined to discuss other firms he considered, but he said the biggest differentiators for Cooley were its client base, the collegiality of the attorneys, and his personal experience with several of the white-collar partners. He would love for some of his former special counsel colleagues to reunite with him at the firm.

Goldstein is the third partner to join the firm's East Coast litigation practice this year, following Travis LeBlanc, a former Boies Schiller Flexner partner and Federal Communications Commission enforcement chief, and Daniel Grooms, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Cooley, well known for its Silicon Valley clientele and connections, has previously pointed to the litigation side of its white-collar practice as an area where it anticipated to grow in 2019.

Goldstein's career as a prosecutor, and now as a litigator, came after a foray into journalism. After graduating from Princeton, he became a staff writer at Time magazine and continued to write for national media outlets such as the The Washington Post on heading to Yale Law School.

He said he thought the country would benefit from more lawyers becoming journalists, and that his past experience as a journalist proved invaluable to his work as a lawyer.

“What I learned how to do at Time magazine was to see a set of things that were happening and be able to tell a story about what we were seeing and to carry a reader through that story,” Goldstein said. “And to me, that is exactly what you do as a litigator or as a prosecutor: taking what is a case that presents all kinds of facts in different directions and figuring out how to tell a story.”

Before the public release of the redacted Mueller report, some in the special counsel's team were reportedly peeved at the way U.S. Attorney General William Barr had characterized the investigation's conclusions, particularly concerning obstruction of justice and the nature of the Trump team's contacts with Russia.

Asked whether he was among these investigators displeased with Barr's rollout of the investigation, Goldstein declined to answer the question.

The work that Goldstein and others on Mueller team did has attracted new scrutiny from the Department of Justice since the completion of Mueller's investigation. Barr has directed the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, John Durham, to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation completed by the special counsel's office. Goldstein refused to say whether he had spoken with Durham or Durham's investigators about the origins of the Russia investigation.

“Please don't read into my declining to answer these questions,” Goldstein said. “We've all, working with Bob, been very, very careful and have followed his lead in exercising enormous discretion, and I just don't think it's right to answer those kinds of questions in a public setting.”