Jessie Liu, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, in Washington, D.C., an April 12, 2019. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

Jessie Liu, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, believes her team of federal prosecutors is "well-equipped" to take over the unfinished work of special counsel Robert Mueller III's recently concluded investigation.

Liu, who has headed the U.S. attorney's office since September 2017, sits at the helm of a team that has inherited the bulk of the work left from Mueller's inquiry, taking over sensitive and politically fraught cases that have ensnared members of President Donald Trump's orbit and former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, who is also a former Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom partner.

Liu, a former Morrison & Foerster partner, said the national security and fraud prosecutors handling those high-profile matters have "a wealth of experience” under their belts.

While Liu kept mum about another topic that has kept her in the spotlight—her ultimately withdrawn bid to be the associate attorney general, the Justice Department's No. 3 spot—she said she was "thrilled" to continue her work atop an office where she's carried out the Trump administration's tough-on-crime agenda. Liu is also focused on a new role chairing Attorney General Bill Barr's advisory panel of U.S. attorneys, where she said she will work to advance his priorities on crime, immigration enforcement, opioid abuse and elder justice.

Highlights of our interview with Liu are below. Answers were edited for length and clarity.

Q: Your office has inherited a lot of cases that were initially brought by the special counsel’s investigation. How has that affected your office's work?

Liu: Without getting into the details of any ongoing case, it's more work. Those cases, as you can tell from appearances that are entered, are largely staffed by senior and experienced prosecutors from our national security section and from our fraud and public corruption section. And often times the people working these cases are supervisors in those sections, so they've had a wealth of experience.

So I think we're very well-equipped to handle it. But it's obviously a docket that we didn't necessarily expect when I came into this job, I guess is how I would put it.

Can you touch on your involvement in those cases? How much of that work do you oversee day to day?

I’ll talk more generally about my role in supervising cases. I would say that at any given time, I am very in the weeds on between 10 and 15 cases, editing filings, following daily developments. Those tend to be kind of the most significant cases in the office.

Do you mean the special counsel cases? Or just those 10 to 15 you follow?

There are certainly special counsel cases that I would say fall within the 10 to 15. I think it depends on how active any particular case is at a given time. But my general practice is, on a really significant investigation or matter, as it's reaching a sensitive decision point—whether that be getting ready to issue a sensitive subpoena or getting close to a decision point with respect to charging—that’s sort of when I tend to be really in the weeds. I’m sure that’s true of a lot of prosecutors.

And then once a case is in court—the significant filings in a significant/sensitive case I would tend to be much more involved in, like actually looking at drafts and maybe doing some edits. It's very collaborative, so there's a lot of back and forth.

A lot of cases that we work, including special counsel cases, we work with parts of Justice and in particular the National Security Division. And so often times we'll be going back and forth within our office, we'll be sort of discussing things with our partners at Main Justice and ultimately trying to reach the best finished product and the best decision that we can.

Your office has worked with the National Security Division on Foreign Agents Registration Act prosecutions. Should we expect an uptick in FARA enforcement from your office in particular?

Well, NSD has made a number of public statements. John Demers was out at the white collar conference at the beginning of March and he gave a talk about FARA prosecutions. And I think what he said is that we can expect to see more enforcement.

Those in general would come as referrals from the National Security Division because the FARA unit sits there. They have new leadership there in Brandon Van Grack. And so it sounds to me, just looking at what they've said publicly, that they expect to be doing more in that area.

We have natural venue I would think for just about any FARA case because the FARA unit is here, so I think if they're doing more, I think we will expect to see more. But we'll just have to wait and see in terms of what actually happens. I know a lot of people are watching that area, and we're watching right along with them just to see what NSD does.

You're well over a year into the job, but what do you view as your big priorities, and perhaps accomplishments, as the U.S. attorney in D.C.?

Our overarching priorities are essentially the same as the department's, so violent crime is probably at the very top of the list. As you've probably seen, there has been an uptick in the homicide rate in D.C., so we are very focused on that and more generally on violent crime. That's always been part of the bread and butter of this office because we have the superior court docket as well as the district court docket. We continue to pursue a lot of national security matters.

You may have seen that more recently we've started a new approach to our 922(g) felon in possession cases. What we've been doing there is trying to partner more closely than we did before with respect to our federal partners. A lot of those cases stem from arrests by the Metropolitan Police Department. What we've been trying to do is to bring in our federal partners, particularly FBI and ATF to work those cases, in hopes of doing two things: One is to try to connect dots between incidents in which guns were used, and second, to figure out where guns are coming into the District from. Since there is no gun manufacturing here in the District, they're all coming from somewhere else.

Are there any lessons that you've learned in your time here? Any regrets in your office's handling of certain prosecutions or cases?

I don't know that there are really any regrets. I think one thing I've learned is it's important to constantly evaluate what's working and what's not. So a lot of people have asked, with respect to the way that we're handling the gun cases, how long is that going to go on? And my response to them is that we're keeping a pretty close eye on whether we think it's working: Are we getting actionable intelligence out of the approach we're taking? Is there any impact that we can see on violent crime stemming from the approach that we're taking?

It's always hard though, because any drop in the numbers could be due to any number of things. And it takes a little bit of time before you can see the effect of any new approach. And so we'll just have to wait and see. But that's something that we're just generally keeping a really close eye on.

The other thing about this job is that a huge component of it is a management job. When I was in private practice I was in firm management, but the vast majority of my time was still spent practicing law.

This office is so big—it's about 330 AUSAs at this point—and just a huge amount of my time is spent on what's the best way to organize parts of the office to be most effective. What sort of technology do we need to implement in the office to make ourselves more effective?

You have a long background as a white-collar defender. Has that experience helped you as U.S. attorney? What should the white-collar bar in D.C. know about you?

Well I think there are a couple of things. One thing I would say is that I do think it's helpful to have perspective from both sides of the v., if you will, because certainly as a prosecutor—and I don't fault anybody for this—you can get pretty in the weeds in your case, and often times quite convinced of the case. And I think it's helpful to have had the background where you kind of look at it from the other side and see what would the defense argue, or what's the other side of the story.

And I think what the defense bar should know is that an enormous amount of work goes into this office in deciding to bring any case. But it is certainly true with respect to white-collar cases as well.

A lot of effort goes into investigating, into evaluating the evidence at all levels of the office, and there's just a lot of talking and thinking about is a charge appropriate in a particular case? And if so, what's the most appropriate charge? What's the evidence we have to support it?

It seems you’ve been vocal in the past about the legal profession and how it should be more diverse and more inclusive for women. I'm curious if you see a lack of diversity problem at the Justice Department—or within the broader legal profession?

I'm also a huge proponent of merit-based selection. So I think we've always got to pick the best people. That said, I think the more different backgrounds and viewpoints that any organization has, the better off it is. So that's what I would like to see.

Have you taken any steps or efforts here within the U.S. attorney's office to perhaps improve diversity?

We do have a diversity committee, which is chaired by my first assistant, and that's been the tradition for a number of years. And I’m personally engaged in that too. So we are always looking for the best people that we can find from different backgrounds, experiences, viewpoints.

We’re very active in going to various bar associations and affinity groups’ career fairs to just kind of get the word out there. I think a lot of this is just kind of getting the word out that, "Hey, this is a career possibility ... this is what it’s like to be an AUSA.”