Mary Jo White

This page is about the attorney and civil servant; for the Pennsylvania State Senator, see Mary Jo White (Pennsylvania politician).

Mary Jo White
31st Chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission
Incumbent
Assumed office April 10, 2013
President	Barack Obama
Preceded by	Elisse Walter
Personal details
Born	(1947-09-27) September 27, 1947 Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Alma mater	College of William & Mary The New School Columbia University

Mary Jo White (born December 27, 1947) is the 31st and current Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. She was the first woman to be United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, serving from 1993 to 2002. On January 24, 2013, President Barack Obama nominated White to replace Elisse B. Walter as Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. She was confirmed by the Senate on April 8, 2013 and was sworn into office on April 10, 2013.

White was born in Kansas City, Missouri and grew up in McLean, Virginia. She received her B.S. from the College of William & Mary in 1970. She earned her M.A. in psychology in 1971 from The New School for Social Research and her law degree from Columbia Law School in 1974.

White became Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York in December 1992, and in March 1993 was appointed by President Bill Clinton as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. She is noted for having overseen prosecutions of John Gotti and the terrorists responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, chief among them Ramzi Yousef.

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told CBS correspondent Scott Pelley that the World Trade Center attack in 1993 "should have been a huge wake-up call for us (terrorism)." White, however, played down the attack as a criminal act.

After President Clinton's controversial last day presidential pardons, she was appointed by new Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate Marc Rich's pardon.

For the past 10 years, she has been chair of the litigation department at Debevoise & Plimpton. In this regard, The Huffington Post noted, "If she is confirmed by Congress, the agency will have at its helm a well-respected attorney who won high-profile cases against mobsters, terrorists and financial fraudsters over the course of nearly a decade as the U.S. attorney for Manhattan."

It has been asserted summarily in Rolling Stone magazine that, among other duties at Debevoise, White has used her influence and connections to protect certain Wall Street CEOs from prosecution, including a notable case involving the firing of Gary J. Aguirre for investigations into the CEO of Morgan Stanley executive John J. Mack.

External links

• Debevoise & Plimpton biography
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Mary Jo White collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• PBS interview with Mary Jo White (May, 2002)
• TIME profile of Mary Jo White (March, 2001)
• Securities Regulation Institute Faculty