When President Donald Trump announced earlier this year that he was nominating David Metcalf to be Philadelphia’s U.S. attorney, it initially seemed as if the move was in line with Trump’s chaotic and contentious attempt to upend the nation’s justice system.
The decision was abrupt, apparently made without advanced input from Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), who’d set up a commission to identify candidates to serve as the region’s top federal prosecutor.
Metcalf was 39 and, unlike many of his predecessors, didn’t have deep roots in the region — but did have some reported ties to officials who’d sought to help Trump adviser Roger Stone years earlier.
And the appointment was announced as Trump was openly pledging to “clean house” in the Justice Department and pull the agency more directly in line with the White House.
But in the months since Metcalf has assumed control over the office and its 140 lawyers, what has stood out so far has been the serious temperament the veteran prosecutor has brought to the role, and the relative lack of drama he’s overseen — particularly in comparison to nearby jurisdictions, where U.S. Attorney’s Offices have been embroiled in controversies over leadership appointments and whether to indict Trump critics.
During a recent interview with The Inquirer at his Center City office, his first since being appointed in March, Metcalf said his deliberate approach toward his first few months in the job has been influenced by his decade-plus career as a Justice Department lawyer — one that included stints in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
He has met with a host of other local stakeholders since taking over — including Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and federal judges — and has avoided ushering in drastic upheaval within his office.
Instead, he said, a key focus has been to encourage his prosecutors to pursue large, ambitious, complex investigations targeting violent crime, synthetic opioid abuse, and healthcare fraud — subjects he said were critical to public safety in the Philadelphia region.
“I do not feel some personal impulse to burn my brand on this office by restructuring and reorganizing it,” he said, later adding: “The greatest offices and the greatest cases come from prosecutors who are hunting them down and competing for them … and that’s the breed of prosecutor we’re trying to create here.”
Composed and self-assured, Metcalf was uninterested in commenting on the broader political landscape surrounding his job. He instead concentrated on the work of his office, whose lawyers prosecute matters including drug trafficking, political corruption, and terrorism across nine counties from Philadelphia to Allentown and west past Reading. They also litigate civil matters on behalf of the federal government.
“I don’t want to say that I’m … bound by precedent or a devotee to the status quo,” he said. “But I do believe in stability, and I’m certainly not going to change things just for the sake of changing them.”
That approach has been generally well-received by many lawyers in his office, particularly given the volatile environment across other parts of the Justice Department.
Even Krasner — an outspoken progressive Democrat who rarely misses an opportunity to criticize Trump, and who was engaged in a long-running feud with a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney four years ago — said he had a “professional and pleasant lunch” with Metcalf earlier this year.
“We have always worked well with the career prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and our teams seem to be continuing to work well together,” Krasner said in an interview.
Rod Rosenstein, who was the deputy attorney general during Trump’s first term, said in an interview that he hired Metcalf a decade ago, when Rosenstein was the U.S. attorney in Maryland. And their paths continued to intersect over the years as their careers wound through the Justice Department.
Rosenstein said Metcalf had “superb legal skills” and “excellent judgment” — two qualities he views as critical for leading a U.S. attorney’s office.
“I think people recognize he’s got the right qualifications,” Rosenstein said.
‘An exhilarating vocation’
Metcalf grew up in northern Virginia and graduated from The Wakefield School, a private prep school about an hour west of Washington, D.C. His father was once an Army colonel, he said, and his grandfather was Joseph Metcalf III, the Navy vice admiral who led the 1983 invasion of Grenada.
Metcalf was a standout soccer player in high school, and was recruited to play by more than 80 college teams, the Washington Post reported in 2003. He used the situation to his advantage, the paper reported — making a deal with his mother that he could let his hair grow down past his shoulders once Division I colleges started sending him letters.
He ended up attending Princeton — playing soccer all four years — and then went on to graduate from the University of Virginia’s law school.
After clerking for U.S. Circuit Judge Albert Diaz, Metcalf spent a few years in private practice before becoming an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland under Rosenstein.
Metcalf said he didn’t have a single epiphany that made him realize he wanted to become a prosecutor. But he said he was quickly drawn to the work, which he found more interesting and important than other legal jobs.
“I thought it was really just an exhilarating vocation in a profession that doesn’t always have the most glamorous applications,” he said.
High-profile connections
From 2015 through 2022, Metcalf worked as a line prosecutor in Baltimore and, later, in Philadelphia — the office he now leads. The two years he spent here were unusual, he said, because they unfolded during the peak of the pandemic, when many aspects of the court system were disrupted and most people were working from home.
Metcalf also spent time during the first Trump administration in Washington, D.C. While there, he worked closely with prominent Justice Department officials including Rosenstein; Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen; Timothy Shea, the onetime U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C.; and then-Attorney General William Barr.
Metcalf’s name was briefly in the news in 2020, when Barr and Shea, Metcalf’s then-boss, intervened in the prosecution of Stone, Trump’s longtime ally, who had been convicted of lying to Congress. After the trial prosecutors wrote in court documents that Stone should be sentenced to at least seven years in prison, Barr and Shea ordered them to walk that back and reduce their recommendation.
Some assigned to the case viewed that as political interference and an attempt to placate Trump. A Justice Department investigation later faulted “ineffectual” leadership by Shea for how the episode unfolded, not politics.
In 2022, Metcalf left the public sector and went to work as a corporate counsel for Amazon. But this March — after Trump was reelected for a second term — Metcalf was suddenly thrust back into the Justice Department, as the White House announced it was nominating him to be Philadelphia’s U.S. attorney.
From nominee to confirmation
The decision came as something of a surprise.
McCormick, Pennsylvania’s newly elected GOP senator, had made a point of publicly announcing that he’d formed a committee to review and vet potential candidates for federal law enforcement positions across the state. And other GOP-connected lawyers in the region had been jockeying for months to try to figure out who might be able carve a path toward the coveted position.
When the White House named Metcalf its permanent nominee, the process was effectively short-circuited.
Metcalf said he couldn’t speak to how or why the process played out the way it did. He said he applied for the job, and “had relationships with folks in the Trump administration” due to his time in Washington during Trump’s first term.
He didn’t specify who those people were. And some of his former bosses — particularly Barr — had fallen out of favor with Trump after his first term.
But Rosenstein said “it’s a mistake to think that people are the people they work for. It’s a big government, and not everyone agrees all the time.”
And in any case, Rosenstein said, he believed Metcalf was nominated “on merit, not on connections.”
William McSwain, who served as U.S. attorney during Trump’s first term, said he believed Metcalf was “extremely well-qualified for the position.”
It took the U.S. Senate six months to vote to confirm Metcalf along with a host of other Trump nominees, but by then, the Philadelphia region’s federal judges had already voted to extend Metcalf’s appointment indefinitely while the process played out.
That move stood in contrast to several other jurisdictions, including New Jersey, where the judiciary declined to extend the tenure of Trump’s nominee, Alina Habba. For months afterward, that office was thrust into turmoil as questions swirled about who could legally serve as its leader.
Pursuing notable cases
During his tenure so far, Metcalf said, he’s been seeking to focus his prosecutors on finding what he called “nationally significant” cases, particularly those targeting violence, drugs, and healthcare fraud, which he views as priorities for the region.
One of the first big indictments he announced was in October when FBI Director Kash Patel visited Philadelphia to help reveal that 33 people had been charged with being part of a Kensington-based drug gang. Metcalf said the case was the largest single prosecution in the region in at least two decades.
He also helped create a new program dubbed PSN Recon, an initiative designed to help Philadelphia Police more readily share intelligence with state and federal agencies about which groups or suspects should be investigated.
Prosecutions overall have increased on his watch, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research organization that collects federal courts records.
So far this fiscal year, prosecutions in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania were up 32% compared to last year, TRAC found, and were on their highest pace since 2019. The most common types of cases charged this year were immigration violations, drug offenses, and illegal firearm possession, according to TRAC.
Earlier this year, Metcalf was reportedly involved in one particularly significant case: an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan and his role in producing an intelligence assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Brennan went on to become a prominent Trump critic.
National outlets including Axios and the New York Times reported that Metcalf had been leading the probe, and that he had concerns about its viability — a notable development given Trump’s public demands to prosecute other adversaries, including former FBI Director James Comey.
Metcalf never commented publicly on his purported involvement in the Brennan case, and declined to do so again during his interview with The Inquirer. The investigation is now reportedly being handled by federal prosecutors in Florida.
Metcalf did allow a short peek into his professional mindset when he was asked more broadly if he’d ever felt pressure from Washington to sign off on a decision he didn’t agree with.
After declining to comment on any discussions he may or may not have had with Justice Department leaders, he paused for a moment and added one final point.
“I will also say that I would be very surprised if that ever happened to me,” he said. “I don’t see it as a problem here.”
