PERSON: Bill McSwain

Duane Morris LLP

Partner and Co-Chair of the White-Collar Criminal Defense, Corporate Investigations, and Regulatory Compliance Group

William Miller McSwain (born 1969) is an American attorney and a former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, a position he held from April 6, 2018 to January 22, 2021. He was nominated to the post by President Donald Trump. After leaving his position as U.S. Attorney, McSwain entered private practice at Duane Morris LLP. He then ran, unsuccessfully, for the Republican nomination for Governor of Pennsylvania in 2022 after which he again returned to private practice.

McSwain graduated from Yale University in 1991. After graduating from Yale, he spent four years in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer. He commanded a platoon in that role. In 2000, he graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

From 2003 to 2006, McSwain was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; the district, based in Philadelphia, covers nine counties (Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, Chester, Berks, Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, and Northampton). In 2006, McSwain left the U.S. Attorney’s Office to join the law firm Drinker, Biddle & Reath in Center City, Philadelphia. His work principally focused on business litigation and white-collar defense matters, but he attracted attention among Pennsylvania Republicans for representing conservative litigants in cases over issues such as the Boy Scouts of America’s exclusion of gay scout leaders and the preservation of the 10 Commandments plaque at the Chester County Courthouse. He was successful in both cases. In published letters, McSwain defended George W. Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques” and, in 2016, criticized football player Colin Kaepernick as “uninformed and hypocritical” for his national anthem protests.

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