The Justice Department’s criminal division, which oversees some of the biggest investigations into Wall Street and corporate misdeeds, has a new leader.
David O’Neil, a longtime Justice Department official, will assume the role of acting assistant attorney general on Monday. He will succeed Mythili Raman, who recently announced her departure from the government.
“Dave is an exceptional lawyer, and I am confident that his experience, judgment and integrity will serve him extraordinarily well in leading the criminal division,†Ms. Raman said in an email to the staff this week.
Like Ms. Raman, who took over for Lanny Breuer after his departure last year, Mr. O’Neil agreed to fill the role on an interim basis only. But the job could last months.
The nomination of Leslie Caldwell, the White House’s choice to lead the criminal division, has cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee but has yet to receive full Senate approval. The timetable for considering Ms. Caldwell, a former federal prosecutor turned defense lawyer, is unclear.
Mr. O’Neil, and ultimately Ms. Caldwell, if she is approved, will inherit a long docket of Wall Street cases. An investigation into banks that attempted to rig a key benchmark interest rate, known as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, paved the way for a new crackdown on the potential manipulation of foreign currencies. Both cases, overseen by Mr. Breuer and Ms. Raman, have ensnared some of the biggest names in banking, including UBS and Barclays.
Mr. O’Neil has a background in white collar cases. His Justice Department career began in Manhattan, where he worked as a federal prosecutor on cases involving financial fraud.
In 2009, Mr. O’Neil joined the solicitor general’s office in Washington, and later became a top aide to the deputy attorney general, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official. And in recent months, he negotiated the government’s settlement with Google and other technology companies that wanted to publicly disclose the government’s national security demands for customer data.
Mr. O’Neil, a Harvard Law School graduate who was a clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, also previously worked at the law firm WilmerHale.
