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“The defense bar shouldn’t worry about the breadline,” was Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton’s response when Semafor channeled concerns bubbling among New York’s white-collar lawyers that federal prosecutors would be too distracted by President Donald Trump’s immigration and drug agenda to focus on financial fraud. “We’re going to increase the size of our white-collar group… let those folks know they can still pay for college,” Clayton said at Semafor’s The Ledger event Tuesday.
The Southern District of New York has operated somewhat apart from the Justice Department’s headquarters, with a long leash to tackle crimes in its own backyard. Clayton has balanced that bread-and-butter, including an indictment of 777 Partners executives this fall in a story we’ve been tracking for a while, with White House priorities like fentanyl and the sticky responsibility for overseeing the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
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Clayton also responded to another delicate aspect of the job under Trump: the president’s free use of pardons for politically connected felons. He declined to comment on specific cases but said “our constitutional system is pretty remarkable in that in almost all cases, whatever branch of government is acting, there’s a check.” He cited former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson on the high court’s role in that system: “We’re not final because we’re infallible. We’re infallible because we’re final. They have the final word. And in the pardon, the president has the final word.”