With an Ivy League pedigree and lots of money, Will Scharf vows to take on the establishment from whence he came

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is too moderate — or at least that’s what about 50 people who packed into Krueger’s Bar in University City on a Tuesday night in late January seemed to indicate. They were there to support former Assistant U.S. Attorney Will Scharf, who announced he’s running for Bailey’s job.

“There’s a big difference between Republicans and conservatives. We have a lot of Republicans in the state of Missouri, but we have many fewer true conservative warriors,” Scharf said.

“Conservative” was the word of the night, as the Princeton and Harvard alumus billed himself as a conservative activist and a political outsider.

“We’re going to win this race by bringing together conservatives from around the state of Missouri, conservatives who are willing to stand up for what’s right, conservatives who are willing to take on the establishment, conservatives who are willing to fight for the state of Missouri,” Scharf said.

He touted his bona fides as someone who worked behind the scenes on the confirmations of Brett Kavanaugh (Scharf says he helped him “beat the smears”) and Amy Coney Barrett.

He dropped Clarence Thomas’ and Donald Trump’s names as well.

The man who introduced Scharf, former State Senator Bill Onder (R-St. Charles), dropped another name.

“If you like the turn the AG’s office took under Attorney General Eric Schmitt, then I think you’ll like Attorney General Will Scharf,” Onder said.

Talking to the RFT, Scharf said

BY RYAN KRULL

he was “excited to present a conservative contrast to the kind of leadership that the people of Missouri have been getting out of Jefferson City.”

He said that Missouri has been in the throes of what he called “political insanity.” His evidence? “Year after year, election after election, voters keep returning state government to a narrow set of lobbyists and insiders.” attorney, who tells the RFT that it was met with “a collective eye roll.”

The implication, of course, being that Scharf himself is an outsider — never mind his wealthy background, elite education and even more elite connections.

Though Scharf’s campaign kicked off in earnest the last day of January, close observers of Missouri politics — as well as former Scharf colleagues — suspected the run for quite some time.

One day before Thanksgiving last year, not long after leaving his job as a federal prosecutor, Scharf had an 11-tweet thread go viral. “Things I learned working as an Assistant US Attorney prosecuting violent crimes in St. Louis, America’s murder capital,” the first tweet read.

The thread contained a handful of Scharf’s takeaways from his time as a federal prosecutor that mirrored nationwide GOP talking points, including supporting police and cracking down on China’s fentanyl exports.

The tweet’s virality led to Scharf appearing on right-wing cable news outlet Newsmax later that week, and by the end of the month, he’d announced he was running for an unspecified statewide office.

Scharf’s announcement was no surprise to a current assistant U.S.

“Scharf talks about things he’s learned prosecuting violent crime in America’s murder capital, but I’m not aware of a single murderer that he prosecuted in America’s murder capital,” the prosecutor says.

The assistant U.S. attorney, who asked the RFT not to print his name, stresses that Scharf is obviously a smart man who worked hard during his two years on the job. But when Scharf joined the prosecutor’s office in 2020, his political ambitions were apparent from day one, and the perception that the job was merely a stepping stone for him rubbed some people the wrong way.

“He’d been a prosecutor for a little over five minutes, and he’s talking about Missouri AG,” the assistant U.S. attorney says, adding that Scharf came into the job with no prosecutorial experience and mostly handled “getting your feet wet” type cases during his two-year tenure.

Court records show that of the roughly 150 cases in which Scharf entered an appearance as an assistant U.S. attorney, a little more than half were for gun possession crimes, with “felon in possession of firearm” by far the most common charge. Another 15 or so cases involved gun possession charges along with other crimes such as drug trafficking.

The remaining cases were against people accused of robbery and kidnapping, dealing fentanyl or crack, or who had escaped from halfway houses. None of the cases Scharf prosecuted, much less made an appearance in, involved a murder charge.

The assistant U.S. attorney who spoke to the RFT says that it’s not necessarily uncommon for attor- neys to come into the office with no prior prosecutorial experience, but they usually stick around for several years and gradually take on more complicated cases.

“Other prosecutors are not just checking the box, literally counting the days from the moment they get there to when they can leave,” the former colleague says. He adds, “You’ll never be able to convince me that he didn’t plan on getting just over two years. So he can say ‘years’ instead of ‘year.’”

After Scharf’s campaign kickoff speech, I asked him if there was one case from his time as a federal prosecutor that exemplified his time in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He cited the case of Walter Wilson, a 39-year-old who was arrested on a gun possession charge and subsequently escaped from the St. Ann jail by working with two other inmates to kick open a window. U.S. Marshals working with local law enforcement apprehended Wilson within 24 hours of his escape.

“What that case brought home for me was the admiration and respect we should have for law enforcement officers,” Scharf says.

Wilson, who was represented by a public defender, conceded the escape attempt, which meant that at trial Scharf’s job was to prove yet again that a man previously convicted of a felony possessed a gun.

The 36-year-old Scharf comes to Missouri politics from an elite background. His father worked in private equity, and Scharf attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for high school, followed by Princeton for undergrad. At Harvard Law School, he was president of the Harvard Federalist Society, a chapter of the highly Continued on pg 17