President Biden poised to tap Ismail “Izzy” Ramsey as top San Francisco prosecutor
The Biden administration is vetting Ismail “Izzy” Ramsey to serve as the top federal prosecutor in San Francisco, an office that tackles high-profile crime in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, according to people familiar with the matter.
By Joel Rosenblatt | Bloomberg
The Biden administration is vetting Ismail “Izzy” Ramsey to serve as the top federal prosecutor in San Francisco, an office that tackles high-profile crime in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, according to people familiar with the matter.
Ramsey, a Harvard-trained former prosecutor turned criminal defense lawyer, is undergoing background checks ahead of his nomination as US Attorney for Northern California, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the choice ahead of a public announcement. The position also requires Senate approval.
The San Francisco office’s recent victories include the convictions of Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes and former President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani in separate fraud trials over the collapse of the startup.
Ramsey, who worked at the office from 1999 to 2003, was recommended to the post by US Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. If approved, he would join other Black men who have held the post, including Cecil Poole in the 1960s and Billy Hunter in the 1970s.
Ramsey didn’t respond to messages seeking comment, nor did the White House. Feinstein’s office declined to comment.
While San Francisco is famous for technological innovation fueled by vast sums of venture capital, the office in recent years has generated relatively few high-level white-collar criminal cases, outside of Theranos. If confirmed, Ramsey will inherit prosecutions already under way against a Chinese chipmaker charged with corporate espionage and UK entrepreneur Michael Lynch, accused of accounting fraud in the $10.3 billion sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard Co.
Leadership Turnover
He would also take over an office that has seen a lot of turnover in leadership — 5 people have served as the US attorney there in the last seven years.
In his prior stint at the US Attorney’s Office, Ramsey handled white-collar cases and co-founded the computer hacking and intellectual property unit. For the past 16 years he has led a small criminal defense shop across the bay in Berkeley with Miles Ehrlich, who was also a prosecutor in the San Francisco office.
In one of the most colorful Big Tech cases of the last half decade, the pair defended Anthony Levandowski, the driverless car engineer who in 2020 pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets from Google in his move to Uber Technologies Inc. Then-President Donald Trump pardoned the engineer in his final days in office.
The son of a prominent California judge and legal scholar, he earned undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University and a masters of business administration from the University of California at Berkeley.
Ramsey would replace Stephanie Hinds, who became the US Attorney after Trump’s pick for the post, David Anderson, returned to private practice.
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