Biography
John P. Cronan has served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice since August 2017 and was the Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division from November 2017 to July 2018. In his current role, John participates in the supervision of the Criminal Division’s more than 600 attorneys, including overseeing prosecutions of financial fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, health care fraud, bank integrity violations, money laundering, cybercrime, intellectual property theft, public corruption, transnational organized crime, international narcotics trafficking, child exploitation, human rights violations, and a variety of other federal crimes. In addition, in January 2018, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed John to lead the Hezbollah Financing and Narcoterrorism Team, to coordinate and collaborate the Department of Justice’s efforts to target and dismantle Hezbollah’s support networks.
Previously, John supervised the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he oversaw the investigation and prosecution of individuals suspected of international and domestic terrorism offenses, largescale international drug trafficking, espionage, and export violations. As a federal prosecutor, John prosecuted numerous national security defendants, including Sulaiman Abu Ghayth, Usama bin Laden’s son-in-law and al Qaeda’s spokesperson after 9/11; Abu Hamza al-Masri, a London-based terrorist leader who orchestrated global acts of terror; and Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to detonate a bomb in Times Square in May 2010. John graduated from Georgetown University and Yale Law School, and clerked for Judges Robert A. Katzmann and Barrington D. Parker, Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.