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Mr. Windom’s later career — beginning with his clerkship with Edith Brown Clement, a conservative judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans — belied that flippancy. From the start, even as a clerk, he adopted the mind-set of an aggressive prosecutor, writing a law journal article proposing a moderate loosening of a criminal defendant’s Miranda rights.

“Tom was always the go-to guy in the department for the big, important national security cases in and around the Beltway,” said Jamie McCall, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Mr. Windom to bring down a white supremacist group known as “The Base” out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Greenbelt, Md., in 2019.

Mr. Windom’s exhaustive work on two particular cases brought him to the attention of Mr. Garland’s team. One was the trial of “The Base” in 2020, in which he creatively leveraged federal sentencing guidelines to secure uncommonly lengthy prison terms for the group of white supremacists. The other was the case one year before of Christopher Hasson, a former Coast Guard lieutenant who had plotted to kill Democratic politicians.

But his blunt, uncompromising approach has, at times, chafed his courtroom opponents.

During Mr. Hasson’s post-trial hearing, Mr. Windom persuaded a federal judge to give Mr. Hasson a stiff 13-year sentence — beyond what would typically be given to a defendant pleading guilty to drug and weapons charges — as punishment for the violence he had intended to inflict.

During the hearing, Mr. Windom attacked a witness for the defense who argued for leniency; Mr. Hasson’s court-appointed lawyer at the time — who is now the Justice Department’s senior pardons attorney — said Mr. Windom’s behavior was “one of the most alarming things that I have heard in my practice in federal court.”

Mirriam Seddiq, a criminal defense lawyer in Maryland who opposed Mr. Windom in two fraud cases, said he was a personable but “inflexible” adversary who sought sentences that, in her view, were unduly harsh and punitive. But Ms. Seddiq said she thought he was well suited to his new job.