Tracing U.S. Attorney Scott Brady's rise from a church in Greenville to the Ukraine investigation

People in the small town where he grew up aren’t surprised that U.S. Attorney Scott W. Brady is making national news as a high-profile federal prosecutor.

The Greenville native won’t comment on U.S. Attorney General William Barr tapping his office to take in information about Ukraine, including what was collected by President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, but longtime friends and colleagues of Brady think he’s up to the job.

“He is more than qualified to handle this,” Mercer County Judge Daniel P. Wallace, another Greenville native, said of Brady.

Wallace sat next to Brady at a Fraternal Order of Police dinner last week after news broke about his office handling Ukraine information. Brady didn’t talk about it at the dinner, Wallace said.

Brady, 50, grew up about 70 miles north of Pittsburgh. He went on to Harvard University, did overseas mission work including a stint in Azerbaijan and then earned his law degree from Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law.

After graduating from law school, Brady clerked for federal Judge Thomas M. Hardiman of Fox Chapel, who was on Trump’s shortlist for the Supreme Court.

Brady worked as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh from 2004 to 2010 and was an associate at Jones Day and at Reed Smith in their Downtown offices. Before Trump nominated Brady as U.S. attorney in 2017, he was head of litigation for Pittsburgh-based Federated Investors.

A little more than a year after Trump nominated Brady, his office was thrust into the national spotlight as it prosecuted Robert Bowers for the October 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill. In July 2019, his office started its prosecution against Syrian refugee Mustafa Alowemer, who is accused of plotting to bomb a North Side church on behalf of ISIS.

In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 , Brady’s office prosecuted the most cases the Western District of Pennsylvania has handled in a year, with cases filed against 665 defendants — 46% more than the previous year. Of those cases, 309 were drug defendants, an 83% increase from the previous year.

Reducing violent crime and dealing with the opioid epidemic are two of the top priorities of the office, Brady has said. His office worked to have Western Pennsylvania named a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area and helped secure $1 million from the feds to fight drugs.

Brady is one of nine U.S. attorneys appointed by Barr to an advisory committee that acts as a sounding board for Justice Department policies and priorities. Barr also named him to a domestic violence working group.

The news that Brady’s office would be assisting with the Ukraine investigation surfaced this month. Brady said Wednesday he can’t comment on his office’s involvement in the investigation. He didn’t dispute the reports, but deferred to comments made by Barr and a letter about the investigation.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd described Brady’s role to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler as receiving, processing and conducting the preliminary analysis of “new information provided by the public that may be relevant to matters relating to Ukraine.”

Last week, Barr said the department is taking in information that Giuliani is gathering in Ukraine about the president’s Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

Justice Department officials must think highly of Brady to give him the Ukraine assignment, former federal prosecutor Bruce Antkowiak said. Antkowiak teaches at Saint Vincent College near Latrobe and, from 1978 to 1983, served as a federal prosecutor in the Western District of Pennsylvania under three U.S. attorneys.

“Undoubtedly he has the respect of a number of people in the Justice Department, and this is why the assignment fell on his desk,” Antkowiak said. “There are a lot of lawyers in Washington who would be able to make an assessment on an international matter such as this. I don’t know why Pittsburgh may have been chosen.”

Although the process involving Ukraine matters is unusual, it isn’t unheard of in the Trump administration, Antkowiak said. It is not the first time the Trump administration has used a field prosecutor to screen material to see if more investigation is necessary.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions tasked U.S. Attorney John Huber, based in Utah, with reviewing the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, was tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s investigation of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. election.

Under previous administrations, those kinds of investigations were handled in Washington, but there’s nothing to preclude the Justice Department from assigning U.S. attorneys based elsewhere to take part in these kinds of investigations, Antkowiak said.

Having a prosecutor like Brady become involved also provides a different perspective than someone who works “inside the Beltway” may have, Antkowiak said.

“I think that’s the reason they call on field prosecutors,” he said. “There’s been a sense that the people in U.S. attorneys’ offices in other districts can bring a different perspective to cases.”

Decades before Brady was Western Pennsylvania’s top federal prosecutor, he was an active member of First Presbyterian Church in Greenville. When he was a senior at Greenville High School, he met Martin Johnson, one of the youth leaders at the church.

“I saw potential,” Johnson said. “He’s good. I just think Scott Brady is going to leave his mark.”

Johnson said it was clear then that Brady was brilliant.

“He’s just smart. He’s not elitist smart, he kept low-key,” Johnson said. “Scott doesn’t have to be flashy.”

Now, Brady and Johnson are in different circles. Johnson is director of Downtown Ministries and operates Fresh Grounds, a faith-based coffee shop in Greenville. Brady will stop and say hello when he’s in town, Johnson said.

“He’s still Scott,” Johnson said.