Biden nominates Eric Olshan as next U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh

Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Olshan is poised to become the next U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania after President Biden nominated him for the post on Monday.

The nomination was part of a group of them announced by the White House for six judgeships and two U.S. attorneys in Pittsburgh and the Southern District of California.

The Western District of Pennsylvania covers 25 counties and has courthouses in Pittsburgh, Johnstown and Erie.

If confirmed, Olshan will replace Troy Rivetti, who has been the acting U.S. attorney since former U.S. Attorney Cindy Chung was confirmed as a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month.

Olshan has been an assistant U.S. attorney since 2017 and is currently the chief of the economic, cyber and national security section.

Prior to coming to Pittsburgh, he served in the public integrity section of the criminal division of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.

He joined the Justice Department in 2007 and had previously served as a clerk for Judge Richard Tallman of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Olshan received his B.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003 and his law degree from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in 2006.

Olshan’s tenure in Pittsburgh has been low-key except for an incident in 2020 when he was on the receiving end of a political barb by then-U.S. Attorney Scott Brady, who had been appointed by Donald Trump.

Olshan had joined with a group of prosecutors nationwide in criticizing then-Attorney General William Barr’s memo to U.S. attorneys to investigate allegations of voter fraud before the 2020 election results were certified.

Many career prosecutors felt then – and still do – that Barr was a Trump sycophant willing to compromise the integrity of the Justice Department to support Trump’s lies, which he continues to spout two years later.

During a news conference at the federal courthouse in Pittsburgh in November 2020 to address an unrelated case, a reporter asked Brady if his office was investigating election fraud and if Brady could confirm if the office had signed off on the letter criticizing Barr’s memo.

Brady replied that one of the two district election officers “who was married to the former chief of staff of Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch [former attorneys general], did sign on that, unbeknownst to anyone in leadership before he signed on to that, and did not talk about that with his fellow district election officer, who’s also our ethics adviser.”

Olshan, one of those election officers, is married to Sharon Werner, who had worked for Holder and Lynch in the Obama administration.

Olshan took offense and told Brady that night that his comment was “inappropriate and retaliatory” and a “partisan attack.”

Last year, DOJ’s Office of Inspector General agreed, rebuking Brady for conduct “unbecoming of a U.S. attorney.”

In the end, there was no voter fraud and Brady left after Trump lost.

Chung and Olshan were the top two candidates to replace him. But the job went to Chung, another assistant in the office.

In nominating Olshan and the others on Monday, Biden said the nominees were “chosen for their devotion to enforcing the law, their professionalism, their experience and credentials, their dedication to pursuing equal justice for all, and their commitment to the independence of the Department of Justice.”