President-elect Donald Trump has picked Jay Clayton, a longtime corporate lawyer and former Wall Street regulator, to be the U.S. attorney overseeing Manhattan.
Clayton served as the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term but has no experience as a criminal prosecutor. If confirmed by the Senate, Clayton would head the nation’s most prestigious federal prosecutor’s office: the Southern District of New York, which has jurisdiction over the largest financial institutions and brings many high-profile white-collar and public-corruption cases.
During his first term, Trump attempted to install Clayton as the U.S. attorney for SDNY in an effort to oust Geoffrey Berman, who held the post from 2018 to 2020. But Trump’s effort was met with fierce resistance in the office, including by Berman himself, who refused to leave until he was allowed to hand the reins to his deputy.
Prosecutors in the Manhattan office balked at Clayton’s lack of experience in criminal law and worried he would simply do Trump’s bidding.
In 2020, Berman told the House Judiciary Committee: “I told the attorney general that I knew and liked Jay Clayton, but he was an unqualified choice for U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York because he was never an AUSA and had no criminal experience.” An AUSA is an assistant U.S. attorney.
Clayton, 58, was a Wall Street lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, representing major financial institutions, before being named to the SEC in 2017. He was confirmed to the SEC on a 61-37 vote, winning over nine Democrats. But he was sharply criticized by progressives for his ties to Wall Street.
