A lawyer on the legal team that argued in favor of a US supreme court ruling granting Donald Trump broad criminal immunity has inflated his credentials as a violent crime prosecutor in a political beauty contest aimed at wooing the former president’s Maga supporters and becoming Missouri’s attorney general.
Will Scharf, who sat on the former’s president’s appellate team fighting charges of subversion brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith, has burnished his crime-fighting credentials on his campaign literature as he seeks to unseat Missouri’s sitting attorney general, Andrew Bailey, in a GOP primary next month.
His campaign website claims that he served “as a federal violent crimes prosecutor in the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of Missouri, leading over 100 federal felony prosecutions and sending violent criminals to prison for hundreds of years”.
In fact, violent crimes accounted for only about 4% of the cases prosecuted by Scharf, who predominantly focused on prosecutions for felony firearm possessions and violations of supervised release.
The overstating of his violent crime fighting activities appears to be part of a grand overture to Trump’s Maga (Make America Great Again) supporters, many of whom have accepted the presumptive Republican nominee’s narrative of a wave of brutal offences carried out by criminals allowed to enter the US during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Scharf and Bailey have been engaging in a bidding war to show off their pro-Trump bona fides in a bitter campaign leading up to the 6 August primary. Both have supported the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Scharf has won the financial backing of groups connected to Leonard Leo, a lawyer and rightwing activist and leader of the Federalist Society who has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into conservative causes, including the tilt of the supreme court rightward through the justices appointed to the bench by Trump when he was president.
Last month, the Concord Fund, an organisation bankrolled by Leo, donated $2m to the Missouri Club for Growth, a Super PAC that has endorsed Scharf.
This followed a $1m donation from the fund and another of $1.4m from Paul Singer, a wealthy hedge fund manager.
Bailey’s campaign has mocked Scharf as “Wall Street Willy” in reference to his New York birth and tried to belittle his campaign contributors as former supporters of Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations who was the last Republican challenger to withdraw from the primary race against Trump.
“Wall Street Willy is raking in millions from the same donors who literally just wasted millions on Nikki Haley’s historically abysmal campaign against President Trump,” said Michael Hafner, Bailey’s spokesperson.
Both candidates have touted their support for Trump in his various legal battles against multiple felony charges.
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“I think Missouri Republican primary voters appreciate the work that I’m doing for President Trump and I think they know, based on how hard I’ve been fighting for President Trump,” said Scharf, referring to his work on the team arguing for the former president’s legal immunity in front of the supreme court.
For his part, Bailey has vowed to sue the state of New York over Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges relating to the falsification of documents to conceal the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor. He has also requested justice department documents regarding Trump’s various prosecutions.
A spokesperson for Scharf’s campaign insisted he was justified in stressing his role in violent crime prosecutions.
“Will Scharf served as an assistant US attorney assigned to the violent crimes unit in the eastern district of Missouri,” the spokesperson said. “The firearms cases he prosecuted were all part of Project Safe Neighborhoods and Operation Legend, the justice department’s targeted programs aimed at inderdicting violent crime in urban areas by prosecuting felons and street gang members for firearms and drug offenses.
“Scharf also prosecuted carjackings, bank robberies, armed robberies, drug distribution offenses, and escapes from custody in his time as a prosecutor.”