By Luc Cohen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Damian Williams, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said on Monday he planned to resign on Dec. 13, about a month before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated.

Edward Kim, who is currently serving as Williams’ deputy, will take over on an acting basis as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Williams’ office has an unusual degree of independence from the Justice Department and is known for bringing high-profile financial fraud and public corruption cases.

Trump, a Republican, earlier this month said he would 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.

One-time cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty last November on charges of stealing about $8 billion from customers of his FTX exchange, and Archegos Capital Management founder Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang was convicted in July of manipulating stock markets, costing Wall Street banks billions.

Bankman-Fried and Hwang both deny wrongdoing.

“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.

Williams has also sharpened his office’s focus on public corruption. In July, he secured the conviction of former New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez on charges of fraud and acting as a foreign agent. In September, he brought bribery charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, also a Democrat.

Menendez has vowed to appeal, and Adams has pleaded not guilty.

A ROCKY RELATIONSHIP

Williams, the office’s first Black U.S. Attorney, took office in late 2021. He led the Southern District of New York’s securities and commodities task force before being nominated to the district’s top post by President Joe Biden.

He once clerked for former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, as well as current Attorney General Merrick Garland when Garland was an appellate judge.

In resigning before Trump takes office, Williams will avoid potentially suffering the fate of one of his predecessors, Preet Bharara, who was fired as U.S. Attorney in early 2017 soon after Trump became president.

Bharara, appointed to his position 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. Williams’ office closed a probe into Giuliani without bringing charges.

Berman wrote in a 2022 memoir that the Trump administration sought to pressure him to bring criminal charges against 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.

During his successful 2024 presidential election campaign, 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,” he said in the statement.

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

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