After every Presidential election, lawyers in San Francisco play a kind of parlor game speculating about who the new administration will pick to be the next U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California.
“Everybody’s thinking about this,” said Rory Little, a professor at UC Law San Francisco and a former prosecutor in the office. Ismail Ramsey, the U.S. Attorney selected by President Joe Biden and dismissed last month by President Donald Trump, recently paid a visit to Little’s law class.
“He’s an old friend of mine, and we asked him that question,” Little said, meaning who will serve next. “He chuckled, and said he didn’t know, and that he was headed for Hawaii. So he’s enjoying the first time off he’s had in, I think, 30 years.”
Time off – until I reached him in Kapalua, where Ramsey, widely known as “Izzy,” confirmed to Gazetteer SF that he doesn’t know who might be next in line.
As the top Justice Department official overseeing a coastal stretch from Monterey to Oregon, the U.S. Attorney prosecutes federal law from a corner office on the 11th floor of the giant federal building on Golden Gate Avenue between Larkin and Polk Streets. And with the position’s powerful perch, naturally, comes intrigue from law students, prosecutors, and the wide array of attorneys who support, fight, or cut deals with the office. All manner of state and federal agencies, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation, routinely interact with it.
All of which is to say: Trump’s second term threatens to upend a tradition of apolitical leadership that, to varying degrees, has allowed the office’s machinery to work. This account of what comes next is based on interviews with current and former lawyers in the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak for the office.
The attorneys revealed concerns about who Trump will appoint to lead the San Francisco office, based in part on what they are seeing in Washington, D.C. This week, Justice Department lawyers defied a federal judge’s orders in a case involving the deportation of 200 Venezuelan people, leading lawyers to wonder if Ramsey’s replacement might be another sycophant who, like so many in Trump’s orbit, is selected because of his or her willingness to flout the rule of law.
The developments have generated “a lot of fear and uncertainty” in the San Francisco U.S. Attorney’s office, said one lawyer working there. Previously, under administrations of both parties, the office hasn’t been reluctant to bring immigration cases against undocumented people. But those cases have traditionally targeted immigrants with violent or criminal histories, the lawyer said.
“The fear is if the net starts getting thrown wider than that, or there’s a wider selection for intake,” the lawyer said. The concern is, “what is the criminal background of those who come into our crosshairs.”
During Trump’s first term in office, he appointed David Anderson as U.S. Attorney in San Francisco. This time around, the city should be so lucky. Anderson is a Republican who, like Ramsey, previously served as a lawyer in the office before cashing out (as many prosecutors do) in private criminal defense practice.
Both Anderson and Ramsey, a Democrat, worked under Robert Mueller, another Republican who in 1998 served as U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and established an apolitical standard and ethic for the office. Anderson and Ramsey returned to lead the office with the respect of attorneys from all political stripes, similar to what Mueller earned, based on their sense of fairness and respect for hard working government lawyers and staff.
Any hope that Anderson might return to the office appears to have been snuffed out by the Trump administration, which concluded that he won’t reliably prosecute its immigration crackdown, lawyers said. Others suggested Anderson simply isn’t interested. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Harmeet Dhillon surfaced as an early possible candidate, multiple insiders said. Dhillon hitched her storied, conservative legal career to Trump by fighting to overturn the 2020 election results — a losing effort that seems to have paid off. In December, Trump nominated her to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Though the appointment removes her from the U.S. Attorney race, it seems Dhillon may still be pulling strings: a lawyer outside the office said a partner at her firm, Mike Columbo, is being considered. Matt Shupe, a spokesman for the Dhillon Law Firm, declined to comment.
There’s more recent speculation that Katie Haun could get the nod. A former prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, Haun led crypto funds as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz before launching her own crypto venture capital fund, Haun Ventures.
Besides the potential benefits flowing from her Andreessen Horowitz connections, lawyers said, Haun’s recent work aligns with the cryptomania that has gripped the Trump administration (and lined the First Family’s pockets). Rachael Horowitz, a spokesperson for Haun Ventures, declined to comment.
Fully staffed, San Francisco’s office should have about 145 Assistant U.S. Attorneys and staff litigating its cases, lawyers said. In recent years, it has suffered defections, with departing attorneys not being replaced, leaving it at about 115 full time employees today. The pattern has taken a toll on morale, lawyers said. Though not unusual during changes in administrations, the Trump administration has put a freeze on new hires at the office, and rescinded eight outstanding offers to attorneys, lawyers said.
Unlike New York City, which has had a consistently strong, aggressive and independent U.S. Attorney’s office no matter who leads it, San Francisco’s office has been uneven and sometimes weak, Little, the UC law professor, observed.
“Our office has kind of ebbed and flowed over time, up and down with different quality people,” Little said. That’s partly a reflection of the fact that San Francisco “is not a hard-charging prosecution community,” he said. “We want a more laissez-faire approach, a ‘let's not hammer everybody kind of district.’ So we get U.S. Attorneys that kind of go up and down.”
That said, Little cautioned that no matter who serves as the next U.S. Attorney, the Trump administration will “pick up a very strong deportation effort” that likely won’t sit well with San Franciscans.
A worst-case scenario is San Francisco gets someone like Ed Martin, the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who Trump has nominated to fill that vacancy. Martin, who has supported the January 6 Capitol rioters, has described federal prosecutors as the President’s lawyers.
The growing concerns have led many local lawyers to hope Patrick Robbins, the acting U.S. Attorney in San Francisco since Ramsey was dismissed, will stay on — or be permitted to. Lawyer sources aren’t sure if he’s a Republican or Independent. Either way, he enjoys the same respect that Mueller, Anderson, Ramsey, and numerous other alumni of the San Francisco office have when they returned to lead it.
Robbins is a “pretty conservative guy, very strait-laced – he's not going to disobey a court order,” Little said. The professor correctly predicted that Robbins wouldn’t answer any questions for this story: Michelle Lo, a spokesperson at the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, confirmed the no comment.
“If I'm Patrick Robbins right now, and I want to remain Acting Attorney, I'm keeping my head down,” Little said.
