Husch Blackwell offices. Courtesy photo

Before Jeffrey Jensen was a corporate compliance partner at Husch Blackwell in Missouri, he was an FBI agent—at one time serving on a SWAT team. Even earlier he was an accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Jeff Jensen. Courtesy: DOJ

"I definitely zigzagged. I started out as a CPA, because at the time I graduated from college, that was the most likely area to find employment," Jensen, now the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri, told St. Louis Magazine last year. "But then the FBI was hiring accountants, because of the savings and loan failures of the late 1980s, and I'd always wanted to be in the FBI."

Jensen has become more of a household name in national legal circles in recent days, on the news that U.S. Attorney General William Barr picked him to review the prosecution of Michael Flynn in Washington, the one-time Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI amid the special counsel's Russia investigation. Flynn's case is pending in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The Flynn case has become a flashpoint among some conservatives who believe the FBI coaxed him into making false statements. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington has rejected Flynn's claim the FBI "ambushed" him. Flynn, with a new set of defense lawyers—he fired his Covington & Burling team—has moved to withdraw his guilty plea. Prosecutors last week filed new court papers contesting Flynn's claim that misconduct has marred his prosecution.

Barr's critics have assailed his penchant for assigning U.S. attorneys to investigate pending, politically sensitive cases that have ties to Trump. "[I]t appears that Barr has recently identified a group of lawyers whom he trusts and put them in place to oversee and second-guess the work of the department's career attorneys on a broader range of cases," Donald Ayer, a former deputy U.S. attorney general, wrote Monday at The Atlantic.

The Justice Department did not immediately comment Tuesday on the contours of Jensen's role in reviewing the Flynn case.

Jensen was confirmed in October 2017 as the top federal prosecutor in St. Louis, leaving behind, for now, his government investigations work at Husch Blackwell. That year, then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions picked Jensen to serve a two-year term on the U.S. attorney advisory committee, a group of prosecutors who offer policy, procedure and management guidance to Main Justice.

Here's a short sketch of Jensen's work in the law:

>> Jensen, a partner at Husch Blackwell since 2013, has raised government misconduct claims in defense of a client. A lead partner in Husch Blackwell's government compliance, investigations and litigation practice group, Jensen said he provided legal services to corporate and higher-education clients including Monsanto Corp.; University of Kansas; AMC Entertainment; Washington University; and Regions Bank. He also advised numerous individual clients, including some defendants prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department. Jensen was on the Husch Blackwell team defending businesswoman Verna Cheryl Womack, accused of lying under oath about her Cayman Island businesses. Womack's defense lawyers, including Jensen, raised a broad attack against government conduct in the case, alleging among other things that investigators failed to disclose favorable evidence. Womack's lawyers did not convince the court. "[T]he conduct of the government in this case cannot be said to be outrageous or to shock the conscience of the court, looking both at the cited individual incidents and at the cumulative impact of all the cited incidents," a U.S. magistrate judge said in a ruling in 2016. Womack, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced in July 2017 to serve one year and six months in prison and ordered to pay $1.7 million in restitution to the IRS. When Jensen was confirmed as U.S. attorney in late 2017, Catherine Hanaway, a former U.S. attorney and one of his colleagues at Husch Blackwell, said in a statement: "The U.S. attorney's office will benefit greatly from Jeff's leadership, integrity, and skill. He is an exceptional lawyer whose unique experience in law enforcement and private practice is a perfect fit for the job at hand." At Husch Blackwell, Jensen reported earning $1.1 million on U.S. executive-branch employee financial disclosures that recorded income in 2016 and 2017. According to a 2019 report at sibling publication The American Lawyer, revenue per lawyer at Husch Blackwell rose 3.3 percent in fiscal year 2018, from $568,000 to $587,000.

>> In 2016, Jensen was on the Husch Blackwell team that wanted to serve as the independent monitor overseeing the city of Ferguson's settlement with the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department. Jensen said he would have been a co-leader with Dan Isom, a former chief of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, according to a submission from the firm. "We will provide objective, cost-effective, and thorough assessments of whether the terms of the consent decree have been implemented, and whether implementation is resulting in constitutional and otherwise lawful policing and administration of justice, and as well as increased trust between the people of Ferguson and the City, the Ferguson Police Department, and the Municipal Court," Jensen wrote in the firm's proposal. A federal trial court in 2017 picked the law firm Hogan Lovells to serve as the monitor. Hogan Lovells said it is "overseeing implementation of the consent decree, an agreement between the parties that calls for a substantial and system-wide overhaul of the city's police department and municipal court operations."

>> Jensen graduated from the Indiana University School of Business in 1988 before becoming a CPA at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He was at the accounting firm for about a year before joining the FBI, serving as an agent from 1989 to 1999. In 1998, after attending night law school, he graduated from the St. Louis University School of Law. Jensen would spend 10 years as an assistant U.S. attorney before going into private practice. From 2010 to 2013, Jensen ran his own firm—Jensen, Bartlett & Schelp, described by one of his co-founders as a boutique white-collar and litigation firm. "It's a big gamble, but we think we see … a niche in the market," Jensen told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2010. The low overhead of a small firm would provide an advantage over "big firms with big overhead" and "big rates."

Matthew Schelp testifies at his confirmation hearing for a Missouri federal court seat in 2019. Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi / ALM

Jensen and Matthew Schelp, who'd been a prosecutor with Jensen, later both joined one of those big firms, Husch Blackwell. Their other colleague, Bruce Bartlett, is now at Jacobson Press P.C. Schelp, who reported earning $524,225 in 2019 at Husch Blackwell and $509,239 the year earlier, was confirmed last week to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. He and Jensen were on the prosecution team in a securities fraud case against St. Louis businessman Michael Shanahan Jr. Schelp, in his confirmation questionnaire, identified the case as one of the biggest he'd worked on. He and Jensen faced off against Winston & Strawn's Dan Webb and Art Margulis of Margulis Gelfand LLC. Margulis, in an interview, described Jensen as "extremely capable" and said he is well-regarded in the legal community.

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