US attorney for DC to step down before Trump inauguration

WASHINGTON (CN) — U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves announced Monday that he will step down from the position on Jan. 16, 2025, days before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Graves, confirmed by the Senate in October 2021, led the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the largest prosecution in the department’s history.

“Serving as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia has been the honor of a lifetime,” Graves said in a statement announcing his resignation. “I am deeply thankful to Congresswoman [Eleanor] Holmes Norton for recommending me; to President [Joe] Biden for nominating me; and to Attorney General [Merrick] Garland for placing his trust in me.”

Graves said that Principal Assistant U.S. Attorney Bridget Fitzpatrick would take over as acting U.S. attorney upon his resignation. Fitzpatrick came to the Justice Department in 2022, after serving as the Security and Exchange Commission’s chief litigation counsel.

Before joining the SEC in 2012, Fitzpatrick worked with Graves in the U.S. attorney’s office in both the fraud and public corruption units.

Graves’ announcement comes weeks after FBI Director Christopher Wray announced he would similarly resign before Trump takes office on Jan. 20, only seven years into his 10-year term.

While Trump initially nominated Wray in 2017, he has since heavily criticized Wray’s handing of the FBI, especially following the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago complex in the classified documents investigation and resulting criminal indictment.

Following his victory in November, Trump tapped ally Kash Patel to serve as his next FBI director, indicating to Wray that he should resign or prepare to be fired come Jan. 20. Patel’s nomination indicates Trump’s intention to use the agency as an arm of his promised retribution campaign against his political enemies.

Graves would likely have been fired upon Trump’s return to office for his role atop the Jan. 6 prosecutions, which Trump has repeatedly targeted during his campaign. He’s also pledged to pardon certain rioters on day one.

In a December interview with Time magazine, Trump said he would begin considering pardons on a “case-by-case basis,” suggesting that nonviolent defendants would be most likely to be pardoned. He added that “a vast majority of them should not be in jail.”

To date, approximately 1,572 people have been charged in connection to the Capitol riot, nearly 600 of whom were charged with assaulting law enforcement officers, including 171 charged with using a dangerous weapon or causing serious injury to an officer. Over 1,068 defendants have been sentenced, 645 to periods of incarceration and 145 to periods of home detention.

Trump could nominate his own U.S. attorney to replace Fitzpatrick, but has yet to name any potential candidate.

Upon taking office, Trump will quickly begin reshaping the Justice Department in his image, already nominating former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to replace Garland as the next attorney general.

Bondi, along with Trump attorneys Todd Blanche, Emil Bove and John Sauer in the Justice Department’s top four roles — deputy attorney general, principal associate deputy attorney general and solicitor general — sets up a department more aligned with Trump than during his first term.

Congresswoman Holmes Norton, Washington’s nonvoting delegate in the House, did not respond to a request for comment regarding Graves’ announcement.

Graves first joined the U.S. Attorney’s office in 2007 as a career prosecutor, following his time in both the Superior Court and Criminal Divisions of the office where he prosecuted violent crime, drug trafficking, illegal firearms possession and fraud cases.

In 2010 he was named a senior assistant U.S. attorney within the office’s fraud and public corruption section, where he rose to acting deputy chief and later acting chief.

During his tenure as U.S. attorney for D.C., Graves oversaw a major decrease in reported crime from 2023, with 2024 set to have the lowest total violent crime in over 50 years.

In addition to the Jan. 6 prosecution, Graves also oversaw the indictments of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members behind a hack-and-leak operation against Trump’s campaign, as well as the largest seizure in Justice Department history recovering $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency from the hack of the Bitfinex global exchange. Graves also charged a murder-for-hire plot targeting former National Security adviser John Bolton, among others.

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