By Luc Cohen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Damian Williams, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan who secured convictions of high-profile defendants including U.S. Senator Bob Menendez and crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, announced on Monday that he will resign ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency.

Williams, who was appointed to the post in 2021 by outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden, will step down on Dec. 13 ahead of the Republican Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. Edward Kim, his current deputy, will succeed Williams on an acting basis as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. 

The office has an unusual degree of independence from the U.S. Justice Department and is known for bringing major financial fraud and public corruption cases. 

Trump already has announced plans to nominate former Securities and Exchange Commission chair Jay Clayton to lead the office. The position requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate. 

During his tenure, Williams secured convictions of former billionaire financiers on fraud charges – which he has long indicated was a top priority. 

Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023, and subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison, on charges of stealing about $8 billion from customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange in what prosecutors called one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.

Archegos Capital Management founder Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang was convicted in July, and later sentenced to 18 years in prison, for manipulating stock markets, costing Wall Street banks billions of dollars.

Bankman-Fried and Hwang both deny wrongdoing. 

Williams also sharpened his office’s focus on public corruption. In July, he secured the conviction of New Jersey Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Menendez on charges of fraud and acting as a foreign agent. Menendez, who denied wrongdoing and has since resigned, is awaiting sentencing.

In September, Williams brought bribery charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, also a Democrat. Adams has pleaded not guilty. 

“I am confident I am leaving at a time when the office is functioning at an incredibly high level – upholding and exceeding its already high standard of excellence, integrity and independence,” Williams said in a statement. 

At a conference last week, Clayton said his office is well-positioned to focus on national security cases, as well as combating terrorism financing and money laundering.

A ROCKY RELATIONSHIP

Williams is the first Black person to hold the post. He led the office’s securities and commodities task force before being nominated to the district’s top job by Biden. Williams early in his legal career served as a clerk to liberal former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, as well as to current U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland when Garland served as an appellate judge. 

In resigning before Trump takes office, Williams will avoid potentially experiencing the fate of one of his predecessors, Preet Bharara, who was fired from the post in 2017 soon after Trump became president. Bharara, who had been appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama in 2009, has said Trump initially asked him to stay on. 

Trump had a rocky relationship with Bharara’s successor, Geoffrey Berman, whose office secured a guilty plea from Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen and indicted two associates of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has worked as an attorney for Trump. Williams’ office closed an investigation into Giuliani without bringing charges.

Berman wrote in a 2022 memoir that the Trump administration sought to pressure him to bring criminal charges against the president’s political opponents. 

“Throughout my tenure as U.S. Attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining,” Berman wrote.  

In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Berman said Williams had “an incredible record of indictments and convictions.”

During his presidential campaign this year, Trump pledged to use the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, which legal experts said could undermine the impartiality of career prosecutors and shatter norms of prosecutorial independence. 

Williams praised his office’s career attorneys as “patriots” and said they acted with independence. 

“They are worthy custodians of this office’s tradition of doing the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons,” Williams said in his statement.

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York;Editing by Noeleen Walder, Lisa Shumaker and Will Dunham)

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