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Andre Damian Williams Jr.American lawyer
Date of Birth: 01.01.1980
Country:  USA |
Content:
Early Life and Education
Damon Keith Williams was born in the borough of Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the metropolitan area of Atlanta to Jamaican immigrant parents. He attended Woodward Academy, where he served as student body president during his senior year. Williams earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard University in 2002, a Master of Philosophy in International Relations from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2003, and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2007, where he was the Editor of the Yale Law Journal. In 2007, the Yale Law Journal published his essay on improving electoral rights in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Career
Prior to entering law school, Williams worked on the 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and in South Carolina as a body man for Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. After his first year of law school, Williams clerked for the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
Williams began his legal career as a clerk to Judge Merrick Garland on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, serving from 2007 to 2008. From 2008 to 2009, he clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court of the United States. He then practiced law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison from 2009 to 2012.
From 2012 to 2021, Williams served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. From 2018 to 2021, while working in this capacity, he led the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force. In 2018, Williams helped secure the conviction of Sheldon Silver, the former American politician and Speaker of the New York State Assembly.
United States Attorney
In March 2021, Senator Chuck Schumer recommended Williams for the position of United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. President Joe Biden nominated Williams to the position on August 10, 2021. He was reported out of committee with a favorable recommendation on September 30, 2021, and was confirmed by the Senate on October 5, 2021. He became the first African American to hold the position of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and as of October 2021, was one of only seven African Americans among the 232 U.S. Attorneys and supervisory attorneys in the district. He was sworn into office on October 10, 2021.
Upon his confirmation, Williams was set to oversee the trial of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell and the case of Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who was charged in connection with the 2017 New York City truck attack.
In 2022, Williams brought charges against two senior executives of the Belarusian state air navigation authority and two employees of Belarus's security services for their roles in the forced landing of a Ryanair Boeing 737 in Minsk.
Personal Life
Williams's family hails from the sugar-growing region of Westmoreland, Jamaica. In 2012, Williams married Harvard alumna and scholar Jennifer Wynn, five years after they met on a train from Washington, D.C., to New York City.
