In less than a year, Damian Williams has taken on a powerful senator, a hip hop celebrity, the mayor of America’s largest city, and one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
Williams, the United States Attorney for Manhattan, oversees the most renowned federal prosecutor’s office in the country. And if Kamala Harris wins the president, his recent record may qualify him for a high-ranking position at the Justice Department.
At 44 years old, Williams may be too young to serve as attorney general. But among Democratic legal circles, he is regarded as a natural candidate for deputy attorney general or director of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
One major reason for the hype is Williams’ reputation for aggressive investigation tactics and ambitious prosecutions, similar to Harris’ as a young district attorney and California attorney general.
Williams’ team “has been far from shy when it comes to fairly muscular investigative steps like the execution of search warrants,” said Martin Bell, a former federal prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office and current partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.
In recent months, such actions have culminated in a slew of high-profile indictments and convictions that have shaken the New York court system.
In one week in September, Williams announced the indictments of Mayor Eric Adams for illegal foreign campaign contributions, wire fraud, and bribery, as well as multi-platinum rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs for sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. The Adams indictment was the first federal charges filed against a serving mayor of New York City in the modern period.
Two weeks ago, Williams’ office, formally known as the Southern District of New York, indicted two Russian employees of the Kremlin-backed media outlet RT as part of a crackdown on Russian attempts to influence the 2024 election.
Over the summer, his office secured the convictions of two long-time Justice Department targets: Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat convicted of bribery, extortion, and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt, and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire and Steve Bannon ally convicted of hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent activity.
All of this followed the March sentencing of disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who was at the core of one of the most significant financial fraud cases in history. Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
It all adds up to a tremendous amount of effort, especially by SDNY standards, which have a long history of pursuing high-profile white-collar cases.
“It has been a big fall, and before that, with Menendez, a big year,” said Arlo Devlin-Brown, a former chief of the public corruption unit at the Manhattan US Attorney’s office.
“When a U.S. attorney comes in, a lot of the big investigations are often legacies of prior investigations that began before the person was a U.S. attorney,” Devlin-Brown, who is now a partner at Covington & Burling, explained. “But these are probably things that Damian had a hand in from the outset, so they really do sort of put a mark on his U.S. attorney-dom.”
Still feeling doubtful.
Williams was born in Brooklyn to Jamaican immigrants, but grew up in Atlanta. In a graduation speech at Columbia Law School last year, he described having a “really, really bad stutter” at the age of five. When he took an IQ test to go into school, he was informed he was “borderline retarded.”
“I still feel doubt in some way, shape, or form every single day,” Williams stated during the address. “But now my skepticism stands beside my confidence. My skepticism keeps me grounded. It checks me. “It humbles me.”
Williams rejected an interview for this article.
Williams eventually went to Harvard and Yale and clerked for former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. He worked as a federal prosecutor for nine years before being selected by President Joe Biden to the position of United States Attorney in 2021. He is the first Black person to lead SDNY.
Williams’ relative youth gives him the advantage of not being as far removed from being a prosecutor working in the weeds of a case as some of his predecessors were. According to colleagues, he has taken advantage of this situation.
Andrea Griswold, who was his assistant U.S. attorney until June and previously co-chief of the office’s securities unit with Williams, said the two benefited greatly from their experience in the Bankman-Fried case. Bankman-Fried was living in the Bahamas when he was indicted, so authorities had to extradite him to the United States.
Griswold stated that she and Wiliams had previously pursued extraditions that were delayed or unsuccessful, and they learned from their mistakes. “So when it came to SBF, we knew how to do this,” she told me.
A possible D.C. promotion.
Some previous U.S. attorneys for Manhattan utilized the position to advance their careers. Before campaigning for mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani held the office under Ronald Reagan for six years. James Comey held it for nearly two years under George W. Bush before being appointed to deputy attorney general and then director of the FBI.
Williams is less ostentatious than some of his spotlight-loving predecessors. In his slim clothes and tortoise-shell glasses, he is “not a ‘look-at-me’ guy,” according to one former coworker.
But Williams’ most recent bombshell cases, the headline-grabbing indictments of Adams and Combs, have legal experts wondering about his plans after November.
A position in a hypothetical Trump government is doubtful. Williams is not the type of loyalist Trump will seek for high Justice Department positions. (It is worth mentioning, however, that Williams, unlike many of his Democratic prosecutor colleagues, has not enraged Trump: the Manhattan district attorney, not Williams, prosecuted Trump in New York this year.)
However, if Harris defeats Trump, Williams could be a perfect fit for the position of Main Justice. One reason is that Williams has “a closer relationship with D.C. than many a Southern District U.S. attorney over the years,” according to one of the office’s alumni.
The office has long been known as the “Sovereign District of New York” due to its reputation for keeping Washington at arm’s length. Williams, however, has tight links with Attorney General Merrick Garland: Williams clerked for Garland while he was a federal appeals court judge early in his career, and the two have remained friends ever since. Garland nominated Williams chair of the attorney general’s advisory council a few months after he was confirmed by the Senate as US attorney.
