A mayor, a rapper, a senator, a billionaire: Meet the man who has prosecuted them all

NEW YORK — In less than a year, Damian Williams has taken on a powerful senator, a hip hop star, the mayor of America’s largest city and one of the richest men in the world.

As the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, Williams runs the most prestigious federal prosecutor’s office in the country. And if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, his recent record may put him in line for a high-ranking post at the Justice Department.

At 44 years old, Williams may be too young to be attorney general. But people in Democratic legal circles see him as a natural choice for deputy attorney general or the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.

A big reason for the buzz: Williams has built a reputation for aggressive investigative strategies and ambitious prosecutions, much like Harris herself did 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 who is now a partner at Simpson Thacher and Bartlett LLP.

In recent months, those steps have resulted in a string of high-profile indictments and convictions that have rocked the New York legal world.

In the span of one week in September, Williams announced the indictments of Mayor Eric Adams for illegal foreign campaign contributions, wire fraud and bribery and multi-platinum rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs for sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy . The Adams indictment marked the first federal charges brought against a sitting mayor of New York City in the modern era.

Two weeks earlier, Williams’ office — formally known as the Southern District of New York — charged two Russian employees of the Kremlin-backed media outlet RT as part of a crackdown on Russian efforts to influence the 2024 election.

And over the summer, his office won the convictions of two longtime targets of the Justice Department: Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat who was found guilty of bribery, extortion and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt; and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire and Steve Bannon ally who was found guilty of hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud.

All of that came on the heels of the March sentencing of disgraced cryptocurrency magnate Sam Bankman-Fried , who stood at the center of one of the most significant financial fraud cases in history. Bankman-Fried is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.

It all amounts to a significant stretch of work, even by the standards of SDNY, which has a long history of pursuing prominent 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 in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office.

“When a U.S. attorney comes in, often a lot of the big investigations are things that are legacies of prior investigations that began before the person was a U.S. attorney,” Devlin-Brown, who is now a partner at Covington & Burling, added. “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.”

Williams was born in Brooklyn to Jamaican immigrants but was raised in Atlanta. At five years old, he had a “really, really bad stutter,” he recounted in a graduation speech at Columbia Law School last year. When he took an IQ test to enroll in a school, he said, he was told he was “borderline retarded.”

“I still feel doubt in some way, shape or form every single day,” Williams said in the speech. “But now my doubt sits side-by-side with my confidence. My doubt grounds me. It checks me. It humbles me.”

Williams declined to be interviewed for this article.

Williams eventually attended Harvard and Yale and clerked for former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. He spent nine years as a federal prosecutor before President Joe Biden appointed him to be a U.S. attorney in 2021. He is the first Black person to lead SDNY.

One advantage of Williams’ relative youth is that he isn’t as far removed as some of his predecessors from having been a prosecutor working in the weeds of a case. Colleagues say he has used that to his advantage.

Andrea Griswold, who was his deputy U.S. attorney until June and before that worked as a co-chief of the office’s securities unit with Williams, said the two particularly benefited from that experience in the Bankman-Fried case. Bankman-Fried was living in the Bahamas when he was indicted, and prosecutors needed to extradite him to the United States.

Griswold said she and Wiliams had pursued extraditions that were delayed or unsuccessful in the past, and they learned from those missteps. “So when it came to SBF, we knew how to do this,” she said.

Some prior U.S. attorneys for Manhattan have used the post as a career springboard. Rudy Giuliani held the position for six years under Ronald Reagan before running for New York City mayor. James Comey held it for nearly two years under George W. Bush before being promoted to deputy attorney general and, later, director of the FBI.

Williams is less grandiose than some of his limelight-loving predecessors. In his trim suits and tortoise-shell glasses, he is “not a ‘look-at-me’ guy,” according to one former colleague.

But Williams’ most recent bombshell cases — the headline-generating indictments of Adams and Combs — have legal observers speculating about Williams’ ambitions after November.

A position in a potential Trump administration is unlikely. Williams is hardly the sort of loyalist whom Trump will seek for top Justice Department appointments. (It’s worth noting, though, that Williams, unlike many of his Democratic prosecutor counterparts, has not earned Trump’s ire: It was the Manhattan district attorney, not Williams, who prosecuted Trump in New York this year.)

But if Harris defeats Trump, Williams could be a natural candidate to move to Main Justice. One reason is that Williams already has “a closer relationship with D.C. than many a Southern District U.S. attorney over the years,” as one alumnus of the office put it.

The office has long been nicknamed the “Sovereign District of New York” for its reputation of keeping Washington at arm’s length. Williams, though, has close ties to Attorney General Merrick Garland: Early in his career, Williams clerked for Garland when Garland was a federal appeals court judge, and the two have maintained a close relationship. A few months after the Senate confirmed Williams as U.S. attorney, Garland appointed him chair of the attorney general’s advisory committee.

For now, even with the election looming, Williams’ focus remains close to home. In particular, the case against Adams and his allies is still being built. At a press conference unveiling the fundraising-related charges, Williams was explicit in his intention to pursue additional targets.

“This investigation continues. We continue to dig. And we will hold more people accountable,” he said. “And I encourage anyone with information to come forward, and to do so before it is too late.”

Williams’ handling of the Adams case has exemplified a key aspect of his tenure as top prosecutor: the aggressive use of search warrants, sometimes long before bringing criminal charges — even against high-profile defendants (and, in the cases of Adams and Menendez, against fellow Democrats).

Last fall, federal agents stopped the mayor on the street, produced a search warrant and confiscated his electronic devices. And last month, hours before the charges against Adams were unsealed, federal agents executed a pre-dawn raid at the official mayoral residence, Gracie Mansion. (After the raid, Adams accused Williams of unnecessarily creating a spectacle.) Williams’ office has also seized the phones or searched the homes of at least nine high-level Adams appointees or allies.

In June 2022, more than a year before prosecutors charged Menendez, FBI agents executed a search warrant at his New Jersey home, where, among other items, they seized gold bars the then-chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee accepted as bribes.

And in March, six months before prosecutors charged Combs, federal agents from Homeland Security arrived in armored vehicles to search his Los Angeles and Miami residences.

“At least historically, the decision to search someone’s phone or search someone’s home or office hasn’t simply been a matter of the technical determination of whether you think there’s probable cause,” Bell, the former federal prosecutor, said. “I think that prosecutors generally won’t pull that step unless they believe that there is vital evidence that could disappear otherwise, and it may be that they have become a little bolder about using search warrants, where in the past a subpoena may have done the trick.”

In a campaign season when cries of “election interference” are pervasive, Williams has not been immune from that charge: Adams has accused Williams and his prosecutors of aiming to jeopardize the mayor’s reelection campaign .

Williams, for his part, told reporters: “We are not focused on the right or the left. We are focused only on right and wrong.”

And though two of Williams’ most prominent recent cases involve powerful Democrats, he has prosecuted politicians of both parties. Earlier in his career, Williams was on the team that secured a guilty plea from then-Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican, for insider trading. (Collins was subsequently pardoned by Trump.)

Still, the timing of the Adams indictment may not be entirely divorced from political concerns. Some former federal prosecutors have wondered whether Williams brought the indictment in September in order to ensure that there would be a charged Adams case on the books in the event that whoever wins November’s presidential election isn’t interested in prosecuting the mayor. It is generally much more difficult to shut down a charged case, which is overseen by a federal judge, than it is to pull the plug on an investigation.

Others attributed the timing of the Adams and Combs indictments to chance. Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at Columbia Law School, said the near-simultaneous charges were likely a function of the cases simply being ready to indict at the same time.

“But since so much of what the office does is going to be a function of how the public perceives it doing its work,” Richman added, “the coincidence is obviously very helpful to the office in establishing a profile of doing the big cases with attention and, it hopes, success.”