Timothy Shea

Timothy Shea is an American attorney and prosecutor who served as acting Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration from 2020 to 2021. Previously, he was interim United States attorney for the District of Columbia, the country's largest U.S. attorney's office; a senior counselor to U.S. Attorney General William Barr at the Department of Justice;

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

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia 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.

Roger Stone sentencing A reduced sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a political consultant and Trump advisor who was found guilty of witness tampering and lying to investigators in the Mueller investigation on Russian interference in the 2016 election, led to a national controversy in Shea's first weeks on the job. 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.

Assistant United States Attorney Aaron Zelinsky testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he "was explicitly told that the motivation for changing the sentencing memo was political, and because the U.S. Attorney [Shea] was 'afraid of the President.'"

Concord Management case In March 2020, Shea's office dropped its two-year-long prosecution of two Russian shell companies, Concord Management and Concord Consulting, which had been charged with conspiring to defraud the United States by running a social media campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Michael Flynn case Shea wrote the Justice Department's motion on May 7, 2020, to dismiss the charges against Michael Flynn, the former U.S. national security advisor to Donald Trump. Flynn had pled guilty to charges of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his conversations in 2016 with Russia's ambassador. Shea's motion said that the FBI agents’ questioning of Flynn "was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn." Shea alone signed the court document — an unusual departure, as court filings are usually signed by lower-level career prosecutors, not political appointees.

Criminal Division overhaul Shortly before his departure, Shea reorganized the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's office. Officials had discussed an overhaul of the unit for years, but some lawyers in the office were said to express concern because some prosecutors were moved out of the public corruption unit, which handles politically sensitive matters like the Roger Stone case. More than 100 DEA agents assisted National Guard troops in Washington during the protests.