Peace out: Lawyer behind Adani indictment quits before Trump's swearing in

Brooklyn US Attorney Breon Peace said he will step down January 10, ending a stint as federal prosecutor that included high-profile cases such as singer R Kelly’s trial for sex-trafficking, a fraud indictment of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and the criminal conviction of a US Congressman.

Peace, a 53-year-old native of Brooklyn, New York, said in a statement Wednesday “it has been the honor of a lifetime to serve as United States Attorney.” He’ll be replaced as head of the Brooklyn office, known as the Eastern District of New York, by First Assistant US Attorney Carolyn Pokorny, according to the statement.

He was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021 and will leave before President-elect Donald Trump takes office January 20.

During Peace’s tenure, his office brought and won several big cases. In August, former US Representative George Santos pleaded guilty to misusing campaign funds. In October, Genaro Garcia Luna, once Mexico’s top public security official, got more than 38 years in prison for secretly providing protection to “El Chapo” and the Sinaloa drug cartel. Kelly, a hip hop star, was sentenced in 2022 to 30 years in prison for sex trafficking.

The Brooklyn office also won major foreign bribery cases: the 2022 conviction of former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker Roger Ng for his role in the looting of Malaysian fund 1MDB; the August conviction of former Mozambique finance minister Manuel Chang for his role in a $2 billion fraud; and the conviction in February of former Vitol Group oil trader Javier Aguilar, who a jury found orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Mexican and Ecuadorian officials.

Under Peace, the office also extracted financial penalties from companies. In March, European oil trader Gunvor Group Ltd. agreed to pay than $660 million to resolve US and Swiss charges that it paid bribes to Ecuadorian government officials. The penalty was one of the biggest ever for a commodity trading company.

In October, RTX Corp. agreed to pay at least $300 million to settle a US criminal probe into illegal arms exports. In 2023, UBS Group AG agreed to pay $1.44 billion to settle criminal and civil actions to end long-running cases over US mortgage-backed securities, resolving one of the bank’s largest outstanding legal issues as it integrates the acquisition of Credit Suisse.

Adani, head of the Adani Group, was indicted in November by Peace’s office for allegedly defrauding US investors by concealing a bribery scheme to win Indian government contracts. Adani said last month he’s working through the legal process “to reconfirm our absolute commitment to world-class regulatory compliance.”

Peace, who was a federal prosecutor in the Brooklyn office from 2000 to 2002, did a stint as an acting professor of law at New York University School of Law before returning in 2003 to Cleary Gottlieb, where he specialized in white-collar criminal defense. In 2007, he became the first African American man elected partner at the firm.