Brendan McGuire

  • Lecturer in Law

Brendan R. McGuire is a Partner at WilmerHale.  He served for nearly 11 years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.  McGuire concluded his tenure as Chief of the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit.  Among other cases, he oversaw the trial teams that secured convictions of Sulaiman Abu Ghayth, Usama Bin Laden’s son-in-law and the most senior al Qaeda leader to have been convicted in an Article III court; Khalid al Fawwaz, Usama bin Laden’s media representative at the time of al Qaeda’s bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, a/k/a “Abu Hamza,” a radical British cleric who attempted to establish a terrorist training camp in the United States.     

Before serving as Chief of the unit, McGuire led the investigations and prosecutions of some of the country’s most significant terrorism cases, including the 2009 kidnapping of Captain Richard Phillips by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean, the 2010 prosecution of Faisal Shahzad for attempting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, and the 2011 prosecution of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for conspiring to kill Americans.

McGuire received his B.A. cum laude in 1998 from Williams College and his J.D. in 2002 from New York University Law School.