Trump picks James McDonald to lead powerful Manhattan prosecutor’s office

Donald Trump’s choice of James M. McDonald to lead the Southern District of New York puts a veteran prosecutor and Wall Street lawyer atop one of the Justice Department’s most influential offices. The Manhattan-based U.S. attorney’s office covers Manhattan, the Bronx, and Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan and Westchester counties, and its reach stretches far beyond local politics because it regularly handles the federal cases that move markets, expose corruption and test presidential power. The White House has not said whether McDonald will be nominated for the Senate-confirmed post or installed in an acting role.

McDonald arrives with a résumé that bridges government, private practice and the highest levels of the legal establishment. He is a former assistant U.S. attorney in SDNY, where he worked inside the office he is now being asked to lead. He currently is a litigation partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, and earlier served as director of enforcement at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a deputy associate counsel in the White House Counsel’s Office under George W. Bush, and a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton.

The appointment matters because SDNY is not just another federal prosecutor’s office. Justice Department materials describe it as one of the nation’s premier legal institutions, with roots reaching back to 1790, and the district court has sat continuously in New York City since 1789. The court now has 45 district judges and 15 magistrate judges, a scale that reflects the volume and complexity of the cases that move through the district. Its prosecutors handle major criminal and civil matters involving national security, terrorism, sanctions and financial crime, including white-collar cases that can reverberate across Wall Street and beyond.

That breadth gives the office unusual national significance. SDNY has prosecuted major terrorism matters since the 1990s, including cases tied to the World Trade Center attack and the East Africa embassy bombings. In April 2026, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan pleaded guilty there in a terrorism case tied to an ISIS-inspired attack plot in Brooklyn, underscoring that the office remains central to some of the country’s most sensitive national security work.

Trump’s move also lands against a politically charged backdrop. Jay Clayton, the current U.S. attorney for SDNY, was appointed by judges on August 20, 2025, under the vacancy statute until a presidentially nominated, Senate-confirmed successor takes office. Trump has since nominated Clayton to be director of national intelligence. McDonald was one of Trump’s personal lawyers in the appeal of Trump’s Manhattan hush-money conviction, which is still pending, and he is also a close friend of Clayton. In an office long prized for its independence, that combination will be read as a bid to shape one of the country’s most powerful federal prosecutor’s posts.