For decades, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have cherished their reputation for two things: taking on the most high-stakes cases, and doing so with little constraint from Washington.
They prosecuted Wall Street financiers Michael Milken and Bernard Madoff, crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried and executives from Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital hedge fund. They have secured guilty pleas from foreign companies such as Glencore and Danske Bank.
During Donald Trump’s first term, prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — which is widely known by its acronym SDNY — got the president’s lawyer Michael Cohen jailed.