President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on being the “law and order” candidate, and the man in charge of his transition team for the Justice Department is someone who has a lot of experience in it.
Kevin O’Connor has been tasked with choosing staffers for Trump’s Justice Department, according to a chart obtained by various news organizations.
O’Connor works for Point72 Asset Management, which was founded by Steven Cohen, a prominent American hedge fund manager. Point72 Asset Management is the successor to Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors, which was part of a large insider trading investigation in 2010 by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Several former employers were eventually indicted by the DOJ in 2013, though O’Connor did not work for the company at the time. Cohen, however, pleaded guilty to insider trading violations and paid a $1.8 billion fine. In January, Cohen reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is barred from managing money for outside investors until 2018.
O’Connor, through a spokesman from Point72, declined to comment.
Before joining Point72, O’Connor was U.S. attorney for Connecticut from 2002 to 2008 — appointed by President George Bush and confirmed unanimously by the Senate — and U.S. associate attorney general from 2008 to 2009. During his tenure with the DOJ, O’Connor also served as associate deputy attorney general, chief of staff to the attorney general and chair of the DOJ’s Intellectual Property Task Force.
As U.S. associate attorney general, O’Connor oversaw the Tax, Antitrust, Environment and Natural Resources Divisions, the Civil Rights Division, the Office of Justice Programs, the Office of Information and Privacy, the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission and the United States Trustees.
O’Connor then left to join the the former law firm of Rudy Giuliani — who is also on Trump’s transition team — Bracewell & Giuliani. There, O’Connor chaired the firm’s white collar practice. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, was floated as part of Trump’s shortlist to be attorney general, but this week he shot down those claims.
In 2015, O’Connor was appointed general counsel at Point72 after a brief stint as vice president of Global Ethics and Compliance for United Technologies Corporation.
O’Connor supported President Obama’s nomination of Loretta Lynch for attorney general to replace Eric Holder.
“I fully appreciate the need for an attorney general who will employ a balanced, open-minded approach to enforcing the law against all parties, whether they be corporations or individuals,” he in a 2015 letter to the Senate.
A little known fact about O’Connor outside his work in the private and public sector includes a failed run for Congress. He ran as a Republican for Connecticut’s 1st District in 1998, but lost to incumbent Rep. John Larson.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department also told the Washington Examiner it had no comment on the changes it expects to see in a Trump administration.
