Matt Axelrod

Matt Axelrod is a longtime public servant with deep criminal and national security enforcement experience, having spent over thirteen years at the Department of Justice. During the Obama-Biden Administration, Axelrod served as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, where he advised on the Department’s criminal and national security enforcement matters, and supervised a staff of twenty-five attorneys. Prior to that, Axelrod spent over a decade as a career federal prosecutor. From 2003 to 2009, he served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Miami, where he prosecuted, among others, the two founders of the Cali Cartel. From 2009 to 2013, he was on detail to Main Justice, where he worked as a Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division and then as an Associate Deputy Attorney General, responsible for overseeing the Department’s criminal enforcement work. After leaving the Department in 2017, Axelrod joined the global law firm Linklaters as a partner, where he did internal investigations and white-collar defense work. Axelrod took a leave of absence from Linklaters in the fall of 2020 to volunteer full-time as a member of the DOJ Agency Review Team and then rejoined the Department on Inauguration Day as Senior Counselor. He was recently detailed to the Office of the White House Counsel, where he serves as Special Counsel and works on both domestic and national security matters. Axelrod graduated with a B.A. from Amherst College, cum laude, in 1992, and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, where he was a Notes Editor for the Yale Law Journal. He spent two years clerking, first for the Hon. Ralph K. Winter, Jr. on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then for the Hon. Janet C. Hall on the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut.