Washington — It was not yet 4 o’clock in the morning in Washington on Wednesday when President Trump, an ocean away at the G7 summit in France, issued a demand for Republican senators: James “Jamie” McDonald, his pick for U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, “must be confirmed” immediately.
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“I may not be able to get the extraordinary Sullivan & Cromwell Partner, Jamie, approved, and I don’t want to take Jay Clayton away from the great job he is doing until Jamie is in place,” the president said on his Truth Social platform.
McDonald is Mr. Trump’s choice to helm one of the nation’s most prestigious federal prosecutors’ offices — known for its independence and tough enforcement of Wall Street malfeasance and other white-collar crimes. And he would succeed Jay Clayton, who has been tapped by the president to become the next director of national intelligence.
Though little-known outside the power corridors of Washington and Manhattan, McDonald has been a notable force during Mr. Trump’s second term. At Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the world’s largest law firms, where Clayton also once worked as a partner, McDonald has played a central role in persuading the Justice Department to drop or settle a string of high-profile cases for the firm’s corporate clients, according to court records and sources familiar with the matter.
Now, questions about his ability to maintain prosecutorial independence could play a central role in any confirmation review, Democratic Senate sources told CBS News, as Mr. Trump has sought toexpedite his nomination.
Sullivan & Cromwell, where McDonald has worked since 2021, has emerged as a firm known for its close relationships with the White House during Mr. Trump’s second term.
Law firms have long sought to make use of close relationships at the Justice Department to assist their clients, which many lawyers consider zealous advocacy. But there are growing questions among senior lawyers at other big law firms and career prosecutors about whether Sullivan & Cromwell’s clients “are getting favorable treatment at the Justice Department — not because the facts of the law compel it,” but because some of the firm’s senior partners are aligned with the president, as one former Justice Department official who worked in a Democratic administration put it.
“Sullivan & Cromwell understands the D.C. game and knows that staying close to the president is the best way to navigate the current environment,” another former Justice Department official who worked in the second Trump administration told CBS News.
On Saturday, the president said in a social media post that he is confident McDonald — a former federal prosecutor and regulator — “will deliver strong results for our Country.”
The future of both Clayton and McDonald’s nominations is in flux after the president directed Clayton not to appear for a planned confirmation hearing on Wednesday, upending Senate Republicans’ plans to quickly install Clayton and resolve a standoff with Democrats.
Sullivan & Cromwell has more than a dozen offices across the globe and is headquartered in Manhattan. Its managing partner, Robert Giuffra, was at one point considered a contender to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general during his second term, sources familiar with the transition said.
“Sullivan & Cromwell is one of the great institutions in our city,” John Catsimatidis, a Manhattan billionaire who is friends with Mr. Trump, told CBS News.
Both McDonald and Giuffra represented Mr. Trump in past private matters. The firm is representing the president in his appeal of his criminal conviction for hiding a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, as well as Mr. Trump’s appeal in a civil fraud lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
And when Mr. Trump issued an executive order against the powerful law firm Paul, Weiss that could have crippled its access to the government, it was Giuffra who helped broker a deal between a business rival and the White House to drop the directive in exchange for the firm pledging $40 million in pro bono services. He did so alongside Boris Epshteyn, Mr. Trump’s personal attorney who has coordinated his legal defense strategy.
McDonald joined Sullivan & Cromwell after serving as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York until 2017 and then as director of enforcement for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an agency that regulates commodity and derivatives markets and pursues civil enforcement actions for violations.
Chris Giancarlo, who headed the CFTC during Mr. Trump’s first term, said he hired McDonald because he wanted someone who would be tough on enforcement. Giancarlo said he liked McDonald’s background as a prosecutor who pursued public corruption and organized crime cases.
“He is strong, but fair,” Giancarlo told CBS News. “He doesn’t wear politics on his sleeve. To the extent people are concerned about political motivations, there is none of that with Jamie.”
The Adani case
More recently, Giuffra and McDonald have found extraordinary success brokering other deals between their clients who are facing investigations by law enforcement arms of the administration.
In May, the Justice Department’s unusual decision to ask a judge to dismiss criminal fraud and foreign bribery charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and other defendants came after negotiations led by Sullivan & Cromwell.
The Adani case was slated to proceed, after it survived a review ordered by Mr. Trump into all pending foreign bribery matters to determine whether they should be dismissed, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Before the motion to dismiss the case, senior Justice Department officials met with McDonald, Giuffra and Andrew DeFillipis of Sullivan & Cromwell, sources said.
In one such meeting at the Justice Department, Giuffra made a presentation that disputed evidence of the alleged bribery scheme, according to sources familiar with the matter and records reviewed by CBS News. One slide touted how one of Adani’s companies is “powering India’s progress,” and another slide said the Trump administration “would not have brought the case.”
If prosecutors were to drop the charges, Giuffra also said at the meeting, Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy, sources said. The meeting and discussion about the investment were reported earlier by The New York Times.
Adani has since agreed to pay $18 million to settle a parallel civil fraud case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And in May, the Treasury Department announced that it had reached a $275 million settlement with an Adani Group subsidiary for apparent violations of U.S. sanctions against Iran. The subsidiary, Adani Enterprises, purchased shipments of liquified petroleum gas sourced from Iran, the U.S. government said.
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Both SEC and Treasury Department officials were also involved in meetings with the attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
CBS News has reached out for comment to the SEC and Treasury Department.
In May, just days after the government filed the motion to dismiss the Justice Department’s case against Adani, two prosecutors assigned to the case abruptly withdrew from it, according to court records. The motion did not include signatures from career prosecutors who brought the case, a departure from common practice that signaled dissent.
Democrats have since launched an investigation into the Justice Department’s decision to drop the Adani case. In a June 11 letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut questioned what they called the “transactional nature” of the decision to dismiss the case. The lawmakers suggested that Adani’s offer to invest $10 billion in U.S. energy and infrastructure projects smacked of a “quid pro quo.”
“I have serious concerns about a Trump loyalist who played a key role in the Adani dismissal serving in a critical U.S. Attorney role,” Warren told CBS News.
In a statement shared with CBS News, a spokesperson for Sullivan & Cromwell said that Giuffra, McDonald and all partners at the firm “have devoted their careers to and built their reputations on being exceptionally effective advocates for our clients, without regard to the administration in Washington.”
“Sullivan & Cromwell is hired to handle the most significant and challenging cases because we have the finest lawyers in the profession, and to suggest that the success of our firm and our partners is the result of anything other than the most rigorous legal argument and factual analysis and our judgment and experience is simply wrong,” the statement added.
A Justice Department official said that the department “often meets with outside counsel to discuss pending cases and potential resolutions to assure the best possible outcome for the American people” and that the decision to dismiss the case came after many months of discussion with the company’s lawyers and an internal review.
The Southern Coal case
McDonald was also one of the lawyers involved in convincing the Justice Department to drop a non-public criminal investigation into Southern Coal, a Roanoke-based coal mining company run by the son of Republican Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.
The investigation was sparked by concerns that Southern Coal was doctoring water testing reports required under a longstanding consent decree with the Justice Department and several states, one of the sources said. ProPublica reported earlier on the closure of the case, but McDonald’s role has not been previously reported.
Following meetings between Justice Department officials in the deputy attorney general’s office and lawyers for Southern Coal, including McDonald, the Justice Department instructed prosecutors to close the investigation, one of the sources said.
The investigation was still in its early stages when it was closed, the source said. A spokesperson for the Justice family’s legal team declined to comment.
In a statement to ProPublica earlier this month, Steven Ruby, an attorney for the Justice companies, said, “Ultimately the finding of the inquiry by the government was that there wasn’t any evidence to pursue criminal charges,” adding, “There’s never been any intentional wrongdoing by the companies.”
Sullivan & Cromwell declined to discuss the Southern Coal case or McDonald’s involvement. A Justice Department official said the defense attorneys followed a common practice by challenging the case.
“The bottom line is that this was a politically motivated prosecution for a case that can and should be resolved civilly,” the Justice Department official told CBS News.
The Live Nation case
During his time at Sullivan & Cromwell, McDonald also represented music concert promoter Live Nation as it settled an antitrust case involving Ticketmaster, court records show.
The Live Nation case, filed in 2024 during the Biden administration, had bipartisan support among Republican and Democratic state attorneys general.Attorneys at the Justice Department who worked on the Live Nation case and attorneys for the states were surprised when they were notified earlier this year by Live Nation that settlement discussions would take place, according to sources familiar with the settlement.
“It was a very strange situation,” said a former Justice Department attorney. “We were told to keep the whole settlement discussions very tight and very close to the vest.”
Negotiations for the settlement between the government and Sullivan & Cromwell took place at the law firm’s offices in Manhattan, handled by Justice Department officials who did not work on the trial team. State attorneys general were left out of the meeting and remained in the lobby for several hours, sources said.
“We had people who were there and ready to join the conversation and were never included,” said Eleanor Blume, a senior legal adviser to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
Blume added that the case’s handling “points to this being an extremely political decision.”
A Justice Department official said that the settlement “exceeded the outcomes of previous administrations” and that the department’s “overriding interest was providing immediate relief for consumers rather than risk an adverse decision or years of continued appellate litigation.”
All but a small handful of states decided to reject the settlement between the Justice Department and Live Nation, and continued to try the case. They prevailed, with a federal jury finding in April that Live Nation was liable for operating an illegal monopoly.
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