Merrick Garland is the nation's new top cop. Meet 15 senior Justice Department officials now serving in the attorney general's inner circle.
- Attorney General Merrick Garland has surrounded himself with an inner circle full of DOJ alumni and former law clerks.
- One top aide took part in Trump’s first impeachment and another worked as an investigator on the Mueller probe.
- More hires are still to come. But here’s a breakdown of 15 key staffers surrounding the nation’s top law enforcement official.
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Matt Klapper, chief of staff
A longtime aide to Sen. Cory Booker, Klapper joined the Biden transition team and was assigned to be the so-called “navigator” for the attorney general nominee through the Senate confirmation process, based in part on his experience with the Judiciary Committee.
Garland faced questions there about how he’d restore the Justice Department’s independence, address domestic terrorism, and handle politically sensitive investigations including a probe into the financial dealings of the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
As an advisor to Booker and while attending Yale Law School, Klapper doubled as a firefighter in New Jersey. Last year, he moonlighted as a volunteer EMS worker after the New Jersey governor issued a call for retired or inactive health care professionals to aid in the pandemic response.
John Carlin, acting deputy attorney general
John Carlin led the Justice Department’s national security division under the Obama administration and has been serving as the department’s acting second-in-charge since January.
Under the Trump administration, Carlin was a top partner at the Washington law firm Morrison & Foerster, where he was a sought-out expert on cybersecurity.
Earlier in his career, Carlin was a career prosecutor in Washington and a top aide to Robert Mueller III during his tenure as FBI director. Carlin is slated to become the top aide to Biden’s nominee for deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, upon her expected confirmation by the Senate.
Kate Heinzelman, chief counsel
Heinzelman clerked for Garland from 2009-10 on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Like many of Garland’s clerks during his nearly quarter-century on the bench, Heinzelman then rose to the Supreme Court, where she worked with Chief Justice John Roberts.
She went on to work as a White House lawyer and deputy general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services under the Obama administration. Heinzelman later worked at the prominent law firm Sidley Austin, where her legal practice focused on privacy and cybersecurity issues.
Brian Fletcher, counsel
Another former Garland clerk, Fletcher joined the attorney general’s office from Stanford Law School, where he was a professor and codirector of the school’s Supreme Court clinic.
Before joining the Stanford faculty, Fletcher had worked at the law firm Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr and served in the solicitor general’s office, the division of the Justice Department that handles Supreme Court arguments and oversees litigation in the appeals courts.
After his clerkship with Garland, Fletcher clerked for then-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Maggie Goodlander, counsel
Goodlander clerked for Garland from 2016-2017 after working as an aide to former Sens. Joseph Lieberman and John McCain. She later clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, now the oldest sitting member of the Supreme Court.
In the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump, Goodlander served as a Democratic counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
Pam Karlan, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights
Karlan joined the Biden administration from Stanford Law School to serve as the acting leader of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. She’s in the position while Kristen Clarke awaits confirmation to hold the role in a permanent capacity.
A veteran Supreme Court advocate and leading progressive voice, Karlan testified in the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump on the constitutional grounds for removing him from office.
“Contrary to what President Trump has said, Article 2 [of the Constitution] does not give him the power to do anything he wants,” she testified in late 2019. “The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.”
John Demers, Trump-appointed head of the national security division
Demers was appointed early in the Trump administration to lead the Justice Department’s national security division and has remained in that role in the early months of the Biden presidency.
Under Trump, Demers played a leading role in ramping up scrutiny on China’s intelligence efforts in the US, overseeing prosecutions against academics accused of misrepresenting or concealing their ties to Beijing. He also presided over the Justice Department’s stepped up efforts to crack down on covert foreign influence with cases brought under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a decades-old law requiring the disclosure of lobbying and other political work for overseas powers.
The Biden administration has yet to nominate someone to replace Demers as head of the Justice Department’s national security division. The division’s leader is expected to play a leading role in the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into the January 6 riot at the Capitol and efforts to address domestic terrorism.
Demers previously worked as a top in-house lawyer at Boeing and was a law school classmate of Carlin, the acting No. 2 at the Justice Department.
Brian Boynton, acting head of the civil division
Boynton stepped down in January as a partner at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr to lead the Justice Department’s civil division.
As the acting head of the Justice Department’s largest litigating component, Boynton has a top role in not only defending the Biden administration’s policies in court but also considering the abandonment of positions and cases taken in court under the Trump administration.
Under the Obama administration, Boynton served as a top aide to former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and helped coordinate the civil division’s defense of the Affordable Care Act. At Wilmer Hale, his corporate clients included Morgan Stanley and Verizon, according to a search of court records.
Last year, while still a partner at the firm, he represented the Democratic National Committee when it got involved in an election lawsuit the Trump campaign filed in Michigan seeking to stop ballot counting in the Detroit area. The case was one of Trump’s many failed efforts to dispute the results of his 2020 electoral loss to Biden.
Elizabeth Prelogar, acting solicitor general
Prelogar joined the Biden administration in January as the Justice Department’s top appellate advocate. As the acting solicitor general, she has played a leading role in shaping arguments the Justice Department has brought before the Supreme Court under the Biden administration—and, in some cases, reversed positions taken under the Trump presidency.
In February, the Justice Department abandoned a Trump era position in backing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the landmark healthcare legislation passed under the Obama administration. More recently under Prelogar’s leadership, the Justice Department sided with college athletes in a legal challenge to the NCAA’s limits on their compensation.
Prelogar is set to figure prominently in deliberations over how the Justice Department under Biden will approach the death penalty. The Supreme Court said this month that it would consider whether the death sentence should be reinstated for Dzhokar Tsarnaev, who was convicted on charges connected to the Boston Marathon bombing.
Before joining the Biden administration, Prelogar was a top partner at the law firm Cooley. She was previously a legal advisor to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Kevin Chambers, associate attorney general
Chambers is back for another stint at DOJ. He joins Carlin — and, if confirmed, Monaco — among the former career federal prosecutors in Washington who are serving at the top of the Justice Department.
Before taking on the role for the Biden administration, Chambers was a top partner at Latham & Watkins, where his practice focused on white-collar defense. He was also chair of the firm’s diversity committee.
At the end of his tenure as a line prosecutor, Chambers prosecuted the R&B star Chris Brown on charges he punched a man in the face outside a hotel in downtown Washington. Brown pleaded guilty in 2014 to a misdemeanor assault charge.
Emily Loeb, associate attorney general
Loeb is a former Obama White House lawyer and top aide in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who returned to the department earlier this year to serve under Monaco in the deputy attorney general’s office.
During the Trump administration, she founded Protect Democracy, a government accountability group that condemned former Attorney General William Barr over his leadership of the Justice Department and called for his resignation.
Her group also took on Trump in court, bringing challenges against the then-president’s aggressive wielding of his clemency powers. In a separate case, the group defeated Trump’s claims that he was immune during his time in the White House from civil lawsuits brought in state court.
In her previous day job, Loeb worked as a partner at Jenner & Block, where she led the firm’s government controversies and public policy litigation group alongside Tom Perrelli, a former third-ranking Justice Department official under the Obama administration.
She and Perrelli prepared Apple CEO Tim Cook ahead of a congressional hearing last year where he testified with other top Big Tech executives, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Matt Axelrod, counselor
After serving on the Biden transition team, Axelrod arrived at the Justice Department as part of the beachhead team for the new administration.
A former federal prosecutor in Miami, Axelrod rose through the Justice Department ranks under the Obama administration. He came to Washington first as a senior counsel to the head of the criminal division and then served as a top aide to then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.
Axelrod joined DOJ after working as a top partner at the law firm Linklaters during the Trump administration.
Tamarra Matthews-Johnson
Matthews-Johnson joined the attorney general’s front office from the US attorney’s office in northern Alabama, where she was a career prosecutor specializing in fraud and civil rights cases.
In 2016, she prosecuted a former administrative law judge for the Social Security Administration on charges he stole records from the agency and engaged in sexual activity with a Social Security beneficiary whose case he was handling. The former administrative law judge pleaded guilty and was later sentenced to a year in prison.
Matthews-Johnson also prosecuted a woman accused of fraudulently claiming nearly $170,000 in Social Security widow’s benefits after killing her husband.
Before joining the federal prosecutor’s office, Matthews-Johnson was an associate at the law firm Latham & Watkins. A graduate of Yale Law School, she clerked for Judge Judith Rogers on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and later for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.
Tim Visser
Visser, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, has been detailed to the attorney general’s office.
Last year, he participated in the prosecution of Michael Hari, who was convicted following a five-week trial on charges he bombed the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, in 2017.
Visser graduated from Harvard Law School, where he led the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, the nation’s oldest student-run legal services office. After clerking for a federal judge, he worked for two years as an associate at the law firm Covington & Burling.
Nicholas McQuaid, acting head of the Justice Department's criminal division
McQuaid, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and Obama White House lawyer, has served since the start of the Biden administration as the acting head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
In that role, McQuaid has overseen the Justice Department’s continued crackdown on coronavirus-related fraud.
After leaving the Obama White House, McQuaid became a partner at Latham & Watkins, where he co-led the firm’s litigation and trial department in New York. McQuaid at one point defended the Democratic National Committee against a lawsuit brought by former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Biden has yet to name his nominee to lead the Justice Department’s criminal division, but three former federal prosecutors — Neil MacBride, Kenneth Polite, and Willy Ferrer — are seen as top contenders. MacBride, a former aide to Biden during his Senate tenure, served as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia under the Obama administration.
Polite and Ferrer led the US attorneys’ offices in New Orleans and Miami, respectively, under the Obama administration.
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