As the U.S. Attorney for New York’s eastern distric, Lorreta Elisabeth Lynch rules over an area that includes Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Nassau and Suffolk county on Long Island. The tough and feared, but self-effacing, attorney will be nominated, on Saturday November 8, 2014, by President Obama to the post of US Attorney General, replacing the out going Eric Holder. If confirmed, she will be the first Black woman to occupy the post. Eric Holder was the first Black man to hold the post.
Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, from a teaching mom and a baptist minister father, the 55-year old Loretta Lynch attended some of the best schools, at some
point being one of a tiny black minority in her elementary school. She went on to attend Harvard University where she graduated with a Bachelors' degree in English and then went to Harvard Law School, where she obatined a JD, 7 years before Barack Obama.
Loretta Lynch was first appointed to the position of U.S. Attorney by President Bill Clinton in 1999, and she served until 2001. In 2010, President Obama reappointed her. Meanwhile, she worked in the private sector, as a partner at Hogan & Hartson, now Hogan Lowells, defending white collar crime defenders. As a US Attorney for New York, she has prosecuted several high profile defendents, including a corruption case against Staten Island US Representative Michael Grimm, a criminal case against cops in Abner Louima murder, and others.
Meanwhile, in 2005, she took time off to work on non profit causes. It was during that time that she visited the African country of Rwanda, to conduct workshops with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
From her experience in Rwanda, she wrote in the Class Report: “I listened to the genocide survivors as they told me how they were forced to hide under the dead to avoid capture, and watched as they showed me the machete scars they still carried. I learned the most as I saw how they carried on with life, reaching out to orphans to create new families, knitting together a future out of the scars of the past.”
She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Stephen Hargrove, whom she married in 2007, and her two step-children.
