Donald Trump has replaced the acting U.S. attorneys in Manhattan and Brooklyn with temps as his nominees for the prestigious posts await Senate confirmation — after a cadre of House Republicans last month urged the president to fill top federal prosecutor jobs with loyalists quickly.
The Trump administration tapped Danielle Sassoon to temporarily lead the Southern District of New York federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan and John Durham to head Brooklyn’s Eastern District of New York.
The posts were previously held by former Deputy U.S. Attorney Edward Kim and First Assistant Carolyn Pokorny, who took over when Damian Williams and Breon Peace, appointed by former President Joe Biden, resigned ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
The move follows a December letter by several GOP Congress members urging Trump to remove all the 93 holdover U.S. attorneys, including first assistants to the previous top prosecutors, and hand-pick their interim replacements.
Sources told Bloomberg Law last month that Trump’s transition team worried that the interim U.S. attorneys promoted after their Biden-appointed bosses stepped down might still be loyal to the former president’s politics.
“The First Assistant is always an ideological protégé of the U.S. Attorney, and thus the transition does not typically result in a change of judicial policy or practice,” the GOP congress members wrote, according to TheHill.com.
Shortly after his election, Trump announced he’d name Jay Clayton, his former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and frequent golfing buddy, to replace Williams, who initiated several high-profile prosecutions during his three years in office — including the pending public corruption case against Mayor Adams and the sex trafficking case against Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Unlike Williams and all others who held the post, Clayton has never worked at the SDNY and has no experience with criminal prosecutions. Before serving as chair of the SEC, he spent 17 years at Sullivan & Cromwell representing banks, hedge funds, major corporations, and investors. He’s currently employed there as a senior policy adviser and counsel.
Trump’s pick for the Brooklyn job is Joseph Nocella, a Nassau County judge the Federalist Society recently feted. The Senate must confirm both.
Both Sassoon and Durham are veteran prosecutors.
Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney, told The News that Sassoon assumed the role late Monday pursuant to an order signed by Trump’s acting Attorney General James McHenry III. The former co-chief of criminal appeals at the SDNY, who’s worked for the office since 2016, served as the lead prosecutor in the case against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, leading to the crypto conman’s conviction at trial in November 2023 and subsequent 25-year sentence.
She also prosecuted the case against Sarah Lawrence College cult leader Lawrence Ray, who was sentenced to a 60-year term in January 2023 after a jury found him guilty of sexually and psychologically abusing classmates and friends of his daughter.
Sassoon, 41, who attended Harvard and Yale, according to her DOJ bio page, clerked for the late staunch conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and is a member of the Federalist Society, an influential legal network for conservatives.
Durham, who sources familiar with the office said was at one point under consideration for the Brooklyn top federal prosecutor job, started in the Eastern District’s Long Island office in 2005 and has been a key player in the federal government’s MS-13 prosecutions. He became the Long Island office chief last year.
He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1998 and from the University of Connecticut School of Law in 2001 and clerked for U.S. District Judge Stephen C. Robinson in Manhattan, according to his DOJ bio.
The White House did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
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