Once More Through the Revolving Door for Justice’s Breuer

Coming off a grueling four-year stint at the Justice Department, Lanny A. Breuer is poised to make a soft landing in the private sector.

Covington & Burling, a prominent law firm, plans to announce on Thursday that Mr. Breuer will be its vice chairman. The firm created the role especially for Mr. Breuer, a Washington insider who most recently led the Justice Department’s investigation into the financial crisis.

For Mr. Breuer, who will now shift to defending large corporations, Covington is familiar turf. He previously spent nearly two decades there.

“There’s a strong emotional pull to the firm,” Mr. Breuer, who departed as the Justice Department’s criminal division chief on March 1, said in an interview. “It’s my professional home.”

Mr. Breuer is expected to earn about $4 million in his first year at Covington. In addition to representing clients, he will serve as an ambassador of sorts for the firm as it seeks to grow overseas.

The move is his latest turn through Washington’s revolving door, the symbolic portal connecting government service and private practice. Mr. Breuer, who began his career as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and later represented President Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings, is joining Covington for the third time.

Like Mr. Breuer, Covington operates at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street. It has represented several financial clients facing federal scrutiny, including the New York Stock Exchange, JPMorgan Chase and the former chief executive of IndyMac.

Such relationships could arouse suspicion among consumer advocates. Mary Jo White, who has been both a federal prosecutor and a defense lawyer, faces similar questions as she prepares to run the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But another school of thought holds that the revolving door instills prosecutors with valuable knowledge of Wall Street. And under ethics rules, Mr. Breuer cannot work for Covington on any case he handled at the Justice Department and must wait two years before facing off with the agency.

“What people dismissively talk about as the revolving door allows people to be better public servants and private litigants,” he said. “I believe I was a better assistant attorney general because of my deep experience in the private sector.”

Mr. Breuer’s Justice Department tenure came at a critical period: the aftermath of the financial crisis.

While critics of Wall Street blamed Mr. Breuer for not bringing cases against the banks and executives at the center of the crisis, they praised him for the prosecution of R. Allen Stanford, who was sentenced to 110 years in prison for a Ponzi scheme, and for the criminal case against BP in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. His biggest victory came last year, when a Japanese subsidiary of UBS pleaded guilty to manipulating the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. It was the first unit of a big global bank to plead guilty in two decades.

“We’re proud to welcome him home,” said Timothy C. Hester, Covington’s chairman.