Grand jury subpoenas land at the DA’s office weeks after a federal judge’s referral, and Krasner says the case does not concern him at all.
Philadelphia’s district attorney is now on the other side of a federal investigation. The Justice Department has sent grand jury subpoenas to District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office, according to Fox News, which first reported the subpoenas on Tuesday, citing two sources briefed on them. The sources said the subpoenas concern potential obstruction of justice in the handling of cases before federal judges. One source each at the Washington Examiner and the New York Post confirmed the subpoenas to those outlets. The Justice Department declined to comment, and no subpoena has been made public.
The story got a full airing in Philadelphia on Thursday, when WHYY’s Studio 2 devoted an episode to what it called “the DOJ investigation into Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner.” WHYY was careful about where the claim comes from. Its episode summary reads, “According to reporting from multiple news outlets, the U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office.” Krasner appeared on the program himself, and he was not acting worried. He said the investigation “does not concern me at all,” and added, “There is not a jury in the world that is going to find me guilty of anything,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s account of the interview, which reported that the subpoenas sought documents and emails connected to a post-conviction case.
What is fully on the public record is the court fight underneath all of this. On September 15, U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond disqualified Krasner and Matthew Stiegler, the chief of the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, from the habeas case of Dennis Johnson, and referred both men to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia for investigation. In a 40-page memorandum, Diamond wrote that “the credible evidence is tantamount to a prima facie showing of conduct that may constitute false statements, false declarations made under oath, perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy.” He added, “I have thus reluctantly concluded that Philadelphia’s highest law enforcement official and one of his top assistants may have violated the law.”
Johnson was convicted in 2009 of second-degree murder in the 2007 killing of Kenyatta Smith. In November 2022, Krasner’s office backed Johnson’s bid for relief, saying his trial lawyer had been ineffective. This June, the office moved to withdraw that support, citing material misstatements in the filing. Diamond found that Stiegler pushed a plan to blame the errors on a junior prosecutor, Jaclyn Mason, who has since resigned, and that Krasner called the plan a “really good idea.” Supervisors refused to go along. The judge found that Krasner insisted on keeping his office involved to “protect the office,” and that he warned of “consequences” if staff told the court about an internal conflict of interest. Those are a judge’s findings after sworn testimony, not criminal verdicts, and Krasner disputes them.
His answer in September was blunt. “I respectfully and vigorously disagree with the court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law,” he said, adding, “I look forward to appealing to the higher court as soon as the law allows.” On Studio 2, by WHYY’s summary of the interview, he went further, calling Diamond a “ringmaster” of a “circus” and calling the Justice Department under President Donald Trump “an attack arm for people the President perceives as enemies.”
What nobody outside the grand jury room knows is the reach of this. Nobody has been charged with a crime. The New York Post reported that it is unclear whether Krasner and Stiegler received subpoenas themselves, or whether the subpoenas went to the office alone. Grand jury work happens in secret, so whether Krasner is a target of the investigation, and whether it reaches beyond the Johnson case, could stay unanswered for months. The sequence, though, is not in dispute. A federal judge said the city’s top prosecutor may have broken the law, and federal prosecutors have now moved on his referral.
