U.S. Attorney

David Metcalf

David Metcalf is the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. As the chief federal law enforcement officer for the District, Mr. Metcalf is responsible for all federal criminal prosecutions and civil litigation involving the United States in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which is one of the nation’s most populous districts with nearly six million people residing within its nine counties (Berks, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Lancaster, Lehigh, Montgomery, Northampton, and Philadelphia counties), covering about 4,700 square miles. Mr. Metcalf supervises a staff of approximately 140 Assistant U.S. Attorneys and Special Assistant United States Attorneys, and a similar number of non-attorney support personnel at offices in Philadelphia and Allentown.

Prior to his appointment, Mr. Metcalf served several years as a federal prosecutor and senior Department of Justice official. He started his career in the Department in 2015 as an Assistant United States Attorney in the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland, where he served as Deputy Chief of Appeals and prosecuted organized crime, narcotics, and violent crime — winning the award for Excellence in the Prosecution of Organized Crime. From 2019 to 2020, Mr. Metcalf served on detail as Senior Counsel to the United States Deputy Attorney General and Counselor to the United States Attorney General, supervising and counseling on the most significant criminal prosecutions pursued by the Department, before returning home to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 2020, where he was an Assistant United States Attorney prosecuting organized crime, gangs and international drug trafficking, white collar fraud, and money laundering.

In October 2022, Mr. Metcalf left the Department of Justice to serve as Corporate Counsel, Government and Regulatory Litigation, for Amazon.com, Inc., where he defended the second largest company in the world against a significant and broad array of government investigations and enforcement actions from international, federal, and state regulators. Prior to working at DOJ, Mr. Metcalf was a lawyer at Covington & Burling LLP.

Mr. Metcalf graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) with honors, from Princeton University. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served as Editor of the Virginia Law Review and graduated Order of the Coif, and then clerked for United States Circuit Judge Albert Diaz, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Mr. Metcalf is a member of the University of Pennsylvania Inn of Court.