Former Deputy Attorney General Joins Columbia Law School as Hertog Fellow in National Security Law
James B. Comey Has Served as U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York and as General Counsel of Bridgewater Associates and the Lockheed Martin Corporation.
New York, January 30, 2013—James B. Comey, a member of the Defense Legal Policy Board that provides advice to the U.S. Secretary of Defense and former deputy attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice, has joined Columbia Law School as a senior research scholar and Hertog Fellow in national security law.
HSBC Holdings announced today that, effective in March, it has appointed Comey an independent, non-executive director and a member of its Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee. The committee will provide governance, oversight, and policy guidance over HSBC’s framework of controls and procedures designed to identify areas where HSBC and the financial system more broadly may become exposed to financial crime or system abuse.
Comey served most recently as general counsel of money manager Bridgewater Associates and previously as senior vice president and general counsel of the Lockheed Martin Corporation. From 2003 to 2005, he was deputy attorney general of the United States. During that time, he chaired the president’s Corporate Fraud Task Force and the Presidential Board on Safeguarding Americans’ Civil Liberties.
Comey was U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York from 2002 to 2003 where he oversaw numerous terrorism cases and supervised prosecutions of executives of WorldCom, Adelphia, and Imclone on fraud and securities-related charges. He was an assistant U.S. attorney in that district from 1987 to 1993, eventually serving as deputy chief of the criminal division. In 1993, he was the lead prosecutor in U.S. v. John Gambino, a six-month mafia racketeering and murder trial.
In previous positions in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, Comey handled the Khobar Towers terrorist bombing case, arising out of the June 1996 attack on a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia in which 19 Airmen were killed. He also handled a wide variety of other cases, including firearms, narcotics, major frauds, violent crime, public corruption, terrorism, and organized crime. While in Richmond, Comey worked as an adjunct professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.
Comey is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.