Q&A: Outgoing US Attorney Who Oversaw SF Corruption Case on the Philosophy of Scandal

San Francisco’s ever-unfolding corruption scandal has toppled the careers of four sitting city officials. After the investigation was first announced early last year, like dominoes, they fell from grace.

First, Mohammed Nuru, former director of San Francisco Public Works, was arrested on corruption charges in January 2020, and lost his job. Less than two months later, Tom Hui, the former director of the Department of Building Inspection, faced allegations of breaching ethics laws by the City Attorney’s Office and resigned before being dismissed. And in November, Harlan Kelly, the former general manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission, faced similar charges, and stepped down from his position. His wife, Naomi Kelly, similarly abandoned her post as city administrator after being implicated in the charges against her husband, despite not being charged herself.

And the case continues to unfold. Just this week, City Attorney Dennis Herrera issued first-of-its-kind orders to suspend city contracts with companies and their executives who were found connected to the bribery and corruption scandal, pausing their business with San Francisco while justice takes its course.

Those corruption charges stemmed from a case spearheaded by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, led by former U.S. Attorney David Anderson — appointed by the Trump administration — whose last day on the job was Friday, Feb. 26. President Biden has yet to appoint his successor.

On his way out the door, Anderson, who hails from San Jose, took time to speak with KQED reporter Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez about his perspective leading public corruption investigations.

Anderson was quick to firmly address what is perhaps the top-of-mind question for many San Franciscans: He does not believe any incoming replacement for his job will in any way divert resources from the ongoing corruption case.

At any one time, about six assistant U.S. attorneys have been working on the corruption investigation, when some cases may only have one or two attorneys, he said, a commitment of resources that demonstrates the importance of the case.

“Is anybody among this field of candidates going to turn away from a promising investigation? It’s hard to believe,” he said.

One important caveat hung over the conversation — as an attorney, Anderson cannot comment directly on any active case. In lieu of specifics, we asked Anderson to engage in a more philosophical conversation about corruption in general, and how his views have evolved over the course of this investigation.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: A lot of our readers and listeners, when they first heard the news and then watched it unfold with every other official over the last year, they felt it in almost all the different classic stages — anguish, anger, disappointment. When you first understood the totality of this, how did you emotionally react to that knowledge? 

U.S. Attorney David Anderson: One of the things they try to do to you in law school is to drub the emotion out of you. You just spend so much time right from the very beginning of your training as a lawyer thinking about things with your head more than your heart. So that’s one piece of context. And the other piece of context is that I’ve been doing this job in one form or other for more than 30 years. I’ve seen a few things in every different kind of case that we do in federal court that could be held up as the source of, to use your words, anguish, anger, disappointment. And you could add a long list of adjectives to it — fear and frustration.

The thing that’s unique and powerful about the public corruption cases is the breach of public trust. And the idea that we are a sovereign people and the people who lead us are our public servants. And so it’s outrageous when you come to the conclusion that those who have been hired to serve the public are instead serving themselves.

Now, I’m talking and going with you along this philosophical line. Obviously, in the context of any particular case, defendants who’ve been charged but have not been adjudicated are presumed innocent. And I have a profound respect for that presumption of innocence. So I want to just close by emphasizing that I am reacting to general questions and not talking about any particular case.

And that’s totally fair. You make the point that you’ve seen a lot in your years of service. So for people who are like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe my government is doing this,’ where would you put this in the context of corruption in other cities? Where would you put it on the scale?

I’m not able to compare what is happening in San Francisco to other cities. I just don’t have the competency to do that.

The one thing that I would say that I think connects fairly to your question is that early on when I returned to the office as a U.S. attorney, I identified 25 people in my office and put each one of them in charge of one particular aspect of the myriad of different kinds of cases that we handle. And one of those 25 is an assistant U.S. attorney who I put in charge of public corruption.

And I said, ‘OK, what I want you to do is I want you to find the people in Chicago and in New York and in the other offices that you identify that have greater experience with public corruption cases than historically this office in San Francisco has had. Find them, talk to them, come back and tell me what it is that we should be thinking about when we do these cases. And he did that. And I think that that has been a contributor to the work that we’ve done.

What would you say to the people who ask, ‘Should this shake my faith in my local government?’

I do think that a city like San Francisco is best served not just by honest leaders, but also by an active citizenry. And I do wonder about the level of engagement that I see in San Francisco.

Just generally speaking, with our political process, what I see is a small number of people who are highly actively engaged. And I see a larger number of people who are enjoying all the other things that San Francisco has to offer.

So, to the extent that looking at the cases that we have charged serves as a wake-up call for someone who is in San Francisco — maybe I should be paying more attention to this — I welcome that.

At this point, several people connected to the scandal have pleaded guilty and cooperated with investigators, including restaurateur Nick Bovis and Walter Wong, a permit expediter. What’s their motivation for doing so? Did they go, ‘I can’t do this anymore!’ Or was it something where, in a practical matter, fancy lawyering and whatnot, they didn’t really have much of an option in front of them?

I’m trying to have the conversation that you want to have and certainly can talk generally about the process by which defendants come to cooperate. That’s something that I’ve seen on both sides of the courtroom going back for four decades.

I think probably the easiest way to look at that is from the perspective of the client-counsel interaction and again, not talking about any particular case and certainly not intruding on any particular attorney-client privilege, but just positing sort of the hypothetical conversation. It usually goes something like this:

You’re confronting these charges. You’re confronting this evidence. What’s going to be your answer? And oftentimes there’s sort of a moment where the client is saying, ‘Well, you know, how come I got to answer? You’re the lawyer.’

But, of course, the lawyer doesn’t know the facts. The lawyer can only learn those from the client, maybe from the discovery that’s provided by the prosecutor. So eventually the conversation will move in the direction of, ‘Do we have an answer to this or don’t we?’ And if we do, then let’s get out there and provide that answer, and if we don’t, well, then let’s start planning for our day of reckoning.

And again, looking at this from that defense perspective, looking at it from the perspective of client and counsel, you can mount a variety of non-factual defenses. If a defendant’s profound constitutional rights have been violated, you may have defenses to the charges even if the charges are true. So there’s a lot of different directions from the defense perspective that you can go. One of the things you can do is, you can cooperate.

And each client has to decide, is this the right move for me? And clients will do that for a variety of reasons. They’ll do it because they want to mitigate exposure. They’ll do it because they feel remorse. They want to try and make things better.

It does happen that you have cooperators that come to you, they come to you either in public or they come to you in secret. And then those cooperators can become an important part of taking the next step or the next half step in an investigation.

You touched on this a bit on KQED’s Forum, but I’m interested in the rationale. Is there a possibility your successor might decide to shift resources and say, ‘I want fewer eyes on this case and more eyes on another case?’ 

The names I’ve heard in the public sphere of candidates to take over the U.S. attorney’s job are experienced, capable. All of them are alums of the U.S. attorney’s office. I’m thinking about this now. All of them are people with whom I’ve served previously. And so this is a strong field of candidates.

In some hypothetical sense, could a new U.S. attorney redirect resources? Yeah.

Is anybody among this field of candidates going to turn away from a promising investigation? It’s hard to believe.

In looking back at this major corruption case that has shaken the city, how do you feel about what you and your officers were able to accomplish? 

In a sense, the business of a prosecutor is always unfinished. There’s never a point where you wake up and you’re like, ‘Oh, good news, no crime today!’ So every day you drive your docket is a day that you’re pushing back on the evils of our community.

And so whether I served for two weeks or two years or two decades, that idea of unfinished business would still be true.

So what will you do now? Is this a John Elway, ‘I’m going to Disneyland,’ moment for you?’

I’ll take some time and then head back to private practice. I’ve done basically three things in my professional life: I’ve clerked, I’ve prosecuted and I’ve defended. So I’ll head back to private practice — I’ve enjoyed that as well.

It has been interesting to take part in the public life of San Francisco as I’ve been able to do as U.S. attorney, and I would say that I’m describing that as an interesting experience, sort of in the same way that my dad might say, ‘This was an interesting new dish that we got for dinner tonight.’ It’s pluses and minuses.

Being U.S. attorney is a great job. You are not tethered in your work to the demands of your clients. Instead, you’re given a broad mandate directly from the president, from the Senate, from the attorney general, to effectuate justice as effectively as you possibly can in your district. You’re given incredible talent to act upon that in the sense of 135 [assistant attorneys], hundreds of staff, and then the partnership of all of the law enforcement agencies with which we team. So it’s an amazing position in all those ways. And then also, you know, you get an opportunity like I’m talking to you, to speak in a public way. So all those things are fabulous.

But at the same time, in private practice, you’re just obsessing over your clients, over their problems. And then that can be pretty great, too.