Timothy Shea

Timothy Shea is a prosecutor who is interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, the country's largest U.S. attorney's office. Previously, Shea was a senior counselor to U.S. Attorney General William Barr at the Department of Justice.

As U.S. attorney, Shea oversees some cases from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and other high-profile investigations.

Shea was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, into a family of five generations of firefighters. He studied political science and government at Boston College, graduating magna cum laude in 1982. He received his law degree, graduating magna cum laude, from Georgetown University in 1991.

Shea is a "close confidant" to Attorney General William Barr and "Barr's right-hand man" at the Justice Department, according to Fox News.

As a senior counselor, Shea advised Barr on changes at the Federal Bureau of Prisons after the death of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. Shea also worked on the Justice Department's Operation Relentless Pursuit, aimed at reducing violent crime in seven U.S. cities.

Barr has known Shea since 1991, when Shea was associate deputy attorney general for Barr in the George H.W. Bush administration.

Shea has served in a variety of roles in the Justice Department. He was an assistant U.S. Attorney in Virginia between 1992 and 1997.

Shea was chief of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office's Public Protection Bureau from 1999 to 2001, responsible for enforcing state laws on consumer protection, elder protection, civil rights, energy, and the environment.

He was chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He also worked on the staff of the House Appropriations Committee.

Shea also worked as a lobbyist and private corporate lawyer. He worked at the law firms Morgan, Lewis & Bockius and Bingham McCutchen.

Barr named Shea the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia on January 30, 2020. Shea replaced Jessie K. Liu, who had been U.S. Attorney since 2017. The office has 300 prosecutors.

Shea chose as his chief of staff David Metcalf, 34, who had been counsel to Barr's deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen.

Some high-profile investigations that Shea oversees are related to special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

Roger Stone sentencing

The Mueller-related case against the political consultant and Trump advisor Roger Stone, who was found guilty of witness tampering and lying to investigators, led to a national controversy in Shea's first weeks on the job. On Feb. 11, 2020, Barr took the rare step of reducing a sentencing recommendation by four prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office that President Donald Trump had called “very horrible and unfair". Barr told ABC News that Shea had initially signaled to him that the recommendation would be about half the time that the line prosecutors requested. Shea's name was attached to both the initial recommendation of a seven- to nine-year prison term for Stone, and Barr's version a day later that called the first version "excessive". The four line prosecutors resigned from the case, and one resigned from the Justice Department entirely.