Trump’s Pick For Manhattan Us Attorney Calms Fears In An Office Wary Of Political Meddling

Prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office breathed a sigh of relief when President Donald Trump announced that James McDonald, once a member of their ranks, would be their new boss.

The Southern District of New York was set on edge last week when its top job abruptly opened up after Trump tapped current Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to be his next director of national intelligence. Attorneys in the high-powered office, which has long prized its independence, feared their next leader might be either baldly political or unqualified — or both. The choice of McDonald alleviated those fears, four current and former prosecutors tell POLITICO.

A former clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, McDonald joined the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office in 2014. Just one year into his tenure, he was selected for a critical role on the team handling one of the office’s most prominent cases: the prosecution of Sheldon Silver, then the powerful speaker of the New York state Assembly.

Carrie Cohen, who led the Silver prosecution, praised McDonald’s “impeccable integrity” and said she had “no doubt that he would be a perfect steward of the office.”

During the first Trump administration, McDonald worked as the enforcement director at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where he brought many cases in conjunction with SDNY. And since 2021, McDonald, who goes by “Jamie,” has been a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, the elite white-shoe firm with ties to the Trump administration.

“He has a great respect for the office and the office has a great respect for him based on his service in the office, his work with the office when he was head of CFTC [enforcement], and more recently on the other side as a defense lawyer,” Cohen said.

McDonald did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It isn’t clear when McDonald and Clayton will move into their new roles. On Wednesday, Trump delayed Clayton’s scheduled confirmation hearing and demanded the Senate confirm McDonald before allowing the permanent DNI nomination to move forward.

McDonald would take over SDNY, seen as one of the most powerful prosecutorial offices in the country, after more than a year of tensions with Justice Department headquarters. Shortly after Trump returned to office, Justice Department officials ordered Manhattan prosecutors to drop their criminal case against then-New York City Mayor Adams, a move that triggered a wave of resignations, including by the interim U.S. attorney. Then, last summer, prosecutors watched as the Trump administration abruptly fired Maurene Comey, a star assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan and daughter of Trump foe and former FBI Director James Comey.

In November, Trump ordered then Attorney General Pam Bondi to probe links between Jeffrey Epstein and notable Democrats, a baldly political directive that stunned prosecutors working in an office known to keep the Justice Department at arms length.

McDonald has worked in recent months as a personal attorney for Trump, handling the president’s appeal of his criminal conviction, among other matters, and some Democratic senators have raised concerns about that relationship, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren referring to McDonald in recent days as a “Trump loyalist.”

But internally, SDNY prosecutors view McDonald’s representation as the sort of standard service that would be given to any white-collar client, three people familiar with the matter, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, said. It stands in contrast, they say, to the more combative, fiery representation — involving bashing the justice system and deploying personal attacks — that some of Trump’s other lawyers have provided.

Still, even fans of McDonald couched their support, saying the Trump administration’s upending of Justice Department norms, particularly in his second term, has led them to question even those they view as standard-bearers.

Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney who hired McDonald at SDNY, showered him with praise, calling him “a very smart, very credentialed lawyer,” on a recent episode of Bharara’s podcast. “He’s as good and as smart as they come. I like him very much,” he said.

But Bharara also suggested that he had been let down in recent years by lawyers he had similarly respected. “Some have disappointed in ways that I wouldn't have expected based on my familiarity with them as people and my familiarity with them as lawyers, and specifically as prosecutors,” he said.

For his part, McDonald already appears practiced in the art of pivoting away from some of the Trump administration’s controversial moves.

In December, he interviewed Clayton at an event at the New York City Bar Association. When Clayton received an uncomfortable question from an audience member about Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had been convicted in Manhattan of drug trafficking offenses, McDonald intervened.

“Jay, understanding that you're not going to be able to comment on particular cases,” McDonald said. He then suggested a way to “maybe rephrase the question,” resulting in an opening for Clayton to address not the pardon, which had infuriated some members of the legal bar, but to tout the recent work of SDNY.