More than a year after Barack Obama was sworn in as U.S. president and almost a year after Eric H. Holder Jr. was confirmed as his attorney general, Obama and Holder finally were able to put their man in place running the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Missouri: former county prosecutor and Cole County circuit judge Richard G. Callahan.
Callahan was sworn in on January 22, and has since spent one week in Washington, D.C., meeting with all of the newly confirmed U.S. attorneys, and a second week of management training in Columbia, S.C. When he sat with the EYE on Tuesday afternoon in his office in the Eagleton federal building downtown, he said it was only his second media interview in his new position.
Asked if he had started to coach any of the attorneys in the office working on cases, Callahan said, “I wouldn’t say I’m playing coach yet. I’m still learning. I’m still meeting heads of different agencies.” The day before he had met with St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief Daniel Isom, and the previous week Special Agent in Charge Roland J. Corvington, who heads the FBI here (both are African-American). “I’m just learning yet,” Callahan said. “I wouldn’t trust myself with a decision yet without all the advice and the experience of the office.”
Corvington took charge of the St. Louis FBI Office in October from John V. Gillies, who had grabbed headlines with his fiery declamations against public corruption – particularly during the successful prosecution of former state Senator Jeff Smith, who currently is serving a year and a day for conspiring to obstruct two federal investigations into campaign fraud. Corvington emphasized to The American that his marching orders were no different than Gillies’ had been – that public corruption remained the FBI’s No. 1 domestic criminal priority, after investigating terrorism.
Callahan made the same point, though with a slightly different emphasis. He said, “Terrorism and counter-terrorism are our No. 1 priority – period. So you’re talking about distant seconds to the No. 1 priority. But the second priority is white-collar crime in general, and I would include public corruption in that. Lock and step with that is health care fraud.” With so much crime to prosecute, he said, “You get to the point of: What isn’t a priority? Everything is, to some extent, as long as you are using your resources to the best advantage and working with other people.”
Callahan steps into a position that had been vacant for nine months since the resignation of Catherine Hanaway, who went to work with former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s firm. The lead assistant U.S. attorney in the office, Michael Reap, ran the show in the interim. It is difficult not to notice that the office’s most high-profile prosecutions of public corruption, among elected officials and in the St. Louis police department, occurred during those nine months when there was no political appointee in charge. Callahan scoffed at the suggestion that partisan politics might interfere with the work of a prosecutor.
He said, “When some Democrats are having a picnic and it rains, they say Republicans must have gotten a hold of a rainmaking machine. Same with some Republicans, they think the same thing. At my swearing in, I said some Republicans think, when a U.S. attorney is nominated by a Republican administration, they are somehow safer. Some Democrats think because someone is an Obama administration nominee, they’re somehow safer. I can say in my 30 years as a prosecutor and seven years as a judge, that is completely outside of my experience. Human nature being what it is, I can’t say it has never happened, but certainly it’s not a part of my personal experience. It’s outside my experience.”
He cited examples. Years ago he prosecuted a brother in law of Congressman Ike Skelton’s in Kansas City on a change of venue. He was the state prosecutor who prosecuted then-Missouri Secretary of State Judith Moriarty (for an election offense involving her son) when Callahan’s own daughter was an intern in the Secretary of State’s Office. He prosecuted state Sen. Jet Banks on tax issues. As a prosecutor in the state capital, prosecuting political friends, enemies and acquaintances was routine. He said, “In Jefferson City, if I didn’t investigate or got a special prosecutor every time I had a connection to somebody in the office I was dealing with, I would have been on vacation six months a year.”
With all of his experience in the state courts, rather than federal, his sense of the law thus far has been shaped by what he describes as the state’s “very decentralized system of justice.” He said, “I remember doing a special prosecution one time for someone who considered himself to be very close to John Ashcroft, when he was governor. This person didn’t like my decision. He said, ‘What’s the next step?’ I said there wasn’t any next step. He wanted to march down to see Governor Ashcroft. I said he didn’t have any authority either. It’s a decentralized system where each prosecutor is king or queen of that jurisdiction, answerable to the people every four years.”
Hence, in part, the time he is taking to learn the federal system. He said, “The federal system is very different, very centralized, and you do have to answer a little to the Department of Justice. It’s a different world. That’s why I am trying to learn the rules before I march forward and get myself in trouble.”
However, he said that shifting back to the prosecution after seven years on the bench would involve no adjustment at all. He said, “In terms of the criminal justice system, I believe the prosecutor has the ethical duty to do complete justice in each case. He or she has the same duty of justice owing to the defendant as to the victim or to society. The prosecutor has the ethical duty to do justice. When I became a judge, I saw absolutely no difference.”
The EYE was obliged to ask Callahan about the role of race in the courtroom. He said, “It is my personal belief that criminal justice should never give the impression or be seen as impacting poor people. On the contrary, it should be seen as a shield for poor people. And I wholeheartedly believe justice has to be color-blind.”
Callahan said this knowing that he has stepped into a position that will empower him to send to prison many people for a long time, even if the job is only his for three years (in the event of a one-term Obama presidency). But Callahan said he doesn’t see his new position as chief federal prosecutor for half of the state of Missouri as very important in the big scheme of things.
He said, “After I tried the school formula case in Jefferson City and listened to superintendents testify for two months, I realized that teachers do much more important work, particularly in public school education systems, as the future of our democracy. I’m not even sure the work we do here is all that important compared to other areas of pursuit. But within this framework, we have an obligation to make a level playing field. I talk about the dream my father had that in this country every child could develop to the full potential we have within us, and we don’t deliver on that as a practical matter. But within the criminal justice system, at least, we must do our part, our small part.”