Retired, Winston & Strawn LLP
Jerry Loeser is of counsel in the Chicago office of Winston & Strawn, and his practice focuses on banking regulation. He has extensive experience in counseling financial services clients on, among other things, bank acquisitions, privacy, financial modernization, the USA PATRIOT Act, Basel II and III, lending limits, capital, trust, affiliate transactions, and Federal Reserve, OCC, FDIC, and CFPB regulations.
Prior to working at large corporate law firms, Jerry was chief regulatory and compliance counsel for Comerica Bank, where he also served as senior vice president and deputy general counsel and as general counsel of its retail bank division. Before that, he served as chief regulatory in-house counsel at Wells Fargo & Co. Jerry began his legal career advising the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C.
Vice President, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
John G. Malcolm oversees Advancing American Freedom’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as Vice President of the organization’s Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law. Malcolm brings to the challenge a wealth of legal expertise and experience in both the public and private sectors.
Prior to joining Advancing American Freedom in 2025, Malcolm was the Vice President of the Institute for Constitutional Government and the Director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Prior to joining Heritage in 2012, Malcolm was general counsel at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, as well as a distinguished practitioner in residence at Pepperdine Law School. From 2004 to 2009, Malcolm was executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association.
Malcolm served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division from 2001 to 2004, where he oversaw sections on computer crime and intellectual property, domestic security, child exploitation and obscenity, and special investigations. Immediately prior to that, he was a founding partner in the Atlanta law firm of Malcolm & Schroeder, LLP.
From 1990 to 1997, Malcolm was an assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, assigned to the fraud and public corruption section, and also an associate independent counsel, investigating fraud and abuse in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was honored with the Director’s Award for Superior Performance for his work in connection with the successful prosecution of Walter Leroy Moody Jr., who assassinated an 11th Circuit judge and the head of the Savannah chapter of the NAACP.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia College, Malcolm began his career as a law clerk to a federal district court judge and a federal appellate court judge, and as an associate at the Atlanta-based law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan (new Eversheds Sutherland).
Malcolm, who resides in Washington, D.C., serves on the Board of Trustees of the Washington National Opera and is a Senate-confirmed member of the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States.
Assistant Deputy Chief, Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering, United States Department of Justice
John W. Vardaman, III has been the Assistant Deputy Chief of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section of the United States Department of Justice since January 2011. Prior to this, he served as Senior Counsel in the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department from 2006 to 2011.
Before joining the Justice Department, Mr. Vardaman was Special Assistant to the General Counsel at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2001 to 2005. While there, he served a stint as Associate General Counsel with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from November 2003 to July 2004.
Before joining government, Mr. Vardaman was an associate at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP from 1997 to 2001.
Mr. Vardaman received his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and subsequently clerked for Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle on the District of Columbia Superior Court.
Corporate Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Microsoft
David Howard is Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel with Microsoft. He joined Microsoft in 2010, after nearly 20 years at Dechert LLP. Howard joined Dechert in 1985, upon completion of a clerkship with the Honorable Marvin Katz of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He left the firm in 1987 to take a special assignment with the White House Counsel’s Task Force on the Iran/Contra Matter. In October 1987, Howard became an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and served in that position through 1994. He returned to Dechert in 1995. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B., cum laude) and the University of Pennsylvania Law School (J.D., cum laude), Howard is a member of the Pennsylvania Bar and admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Second and Third Circuits.
Partner, Covington & Burling LLP
James Garland is a partner in Covington’s Litigation and White Collar Defense & Investigations practice groups. His practice focuses on complex commercial litigation, internal investigations, white collar criminal defense, and national security.
Mr. Garland has substantial experience litigating high-stakes, multidimensional business disputes for clients across a range of industries, including companies in the high-tech, financial services, defense, transportation, media and entertainment, and pharmaceutical sectors. Many of his civil representations have involved parallel enforcement proceedings in multiple forums, often with significant public relations and policy implications.
In the white collar area, Mr. Garland has represented both corporate and individual clients in large-scale, multi-party criminal investigations and related regulatory enforcement actions. Mr. Garland also regularly advises clients concerning national security-related matters, including with respect to issues involving electronic surveillance, cyber-security, and data privacy.
Mr. Garland returned Covington in 2010 after serving as Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to Attorney General Eric Holder at the U.S. Department of Justice. In that role, Mr. Garland advised the Attorney General on a range of enforcement issues, with an emphasis on criminal, antitrust, intellectual property, and cyber-security matters. He worked closely with senior officials at the White House, Main Justice, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, FBI, SEC, and other federal, state, and local enforcement agencies.
Retired, Winston & Strawn LLP
Jerry Loeser is of counsel in the Chicago office of Winston & Strawn, and his practice focuses on banking regulation. He has extensive experience in counseling financial services clients on, among other things, bank acquisitions, privacy, financial modernization, the USA PATRIOT Act, Basel II and III, lending limits, capital, trust, affiliate transactions, and Federal Reserve, OCC, FDIC, and CFPB regulations.
Prior to working at large corporate law firms, Jerry was chief regulatory and compliance counsel for Comerica Bank, where he also served as senior vice president and deputy general counsel and as general counsel of its retail bank division. Before that, he served as chief regulatory in-house counsel at Wells Fargo & Co. Jerry began his legal career advising the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C.
Vice President, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
John G. Malcolm oversees Advancing American Freedom’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as Vice President of the organization’s Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law. Malcolm brings to the challenge a wealth of legal expertise and experience in both the public and private sectors.
Prior to joining Advancing American Freedom in 2025, Malcolm was the Vice President of the Institute for Constitutional Government and the Director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Prior to joining Heritage in 2012, Malcolm was general counsel at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, as well as a distinguished practitioner in residence at Pepperdine Law School. From 2004 to 2009, Malcolm was executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association.
Malcolm served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division from 2001 to 2004, where he oversaw sections on computer crime and intellectual property, domestic security, child exploitation and obscenity, and special investigations. Immediately prior to that, he was a founding partner in the Atlanta law firm of Malcolm & Schroeder, LLP.
From 1990 to 1997, Malcolm was an assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, assigned to the fraud and public corruption section, and also an associate independent counsel, investigating fraud and abuse in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was honored with the Director’s Award for Superior Performance for his work in connection with the successful prosecution of Walter Leroy Moody Jr., who assassinated an 11th Circuit judge and the head of the Savannah chapter of the NAACP.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia College, Malcolm began his career as a law clerk to a federal district court judge and a federal appellate court judge, and as an associate at the Atlanta-based law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan (new Eversheds Sutherland).
Malcolm, who resides in Washington, D.C., serves on the Board of Trustees of the Washington National Opera and is a Senate-confirmed member of the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States.
Assistant Deputy Chief, Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering, United States Department of Justice
John W. Vardaman, III has been the Assistant Deputy Chief of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section of the United States Department of Justice since January 2011. Prior to this, he served as Senior Counsel in the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department from 2006 to 2011.
Before joining the Justice Department, Mr. Vardaman was Special Assistant to the General Counsel at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2001 to 2005. While there, he served a stint as Associate General Counsel with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from November 2003 to July 2004.
Before joining government, Mr. Vardaman was an associate at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP from 1997 to 2001.
Mr. Vardaman received his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and subsequently clerked for Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle on the District of Columbia Superior Court.
Board Member, Center for Equal Opportunity
Roger Clegg is a Board Member at and former President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity. He focuses on legal issues arising from civil rights laws--including the regulatory impact on business and the problems in higher education created by affirmative action. A former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Clegg held the second highest positions in both the Civil Rights Division (1987-91) and in the Environment and Natural Resources Division (1991-93). He has held several other positions at the U.S. Justice Department, including Assistant to the Solicitor General (1985-87), Associate Deputy Attorney General (1984-85), and Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy (1984). Clegg is a graduate of Yale University Law School (1981).
Partner, Covington & Burling LLP
James Garland is a partner in Covington’s Litigation and White Collar Defense & Investigations practice groups. His practice focuses on complex commercial litigation, internal investigations, white collar criminal defense, and national security.
Mr. Garland has substantial experience litigating high-stakes, multidimensional business disputes for clients across a range of industries, including companies in the high-tech, financial services, defense, transportation, media and entertainment, and pharmaceutical sectors. Many of his civil representations have involved parallel enforcement proceedings in multiple forums, often with significant public relations and policy implications.
In the white collar area, Mr. Garland has represented both corporate and individual clients in large-scale, multi-party criminal investigations and related regulatory enforcement actions. Mr. Garland also regularly advises clients concerning national security-related matters, including with respect to issues involving electronic surveillance, cyber-security, and data privacy.
Mr. Garland returned Covington in 2010 after serving as Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to Attorney General Eric Holder at the U.S. Department of Justice. In that role, Mr. Garland advised the Attorney General on a range of enforcement issues, with an emphasis on criminal, antitrust, intellectual property, and cyber-security matters. He worked closely with senior officials at the White House, Main Justice, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, FBI, SEC, and other federal, state, and local enforcement agencies.
Corporate Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Microsoft
David Howard is Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel with Microsoft. He joined Microsoft in 2010, after nearly 20 years at Dechert LLP. Howard joined Dechert in 1985, upon completion of a clerkship with the Honorable Marvin Katz of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He left the firm in 1987 to take a special assignment with the White House Counsel’s Task Force on the Iran/Contra Matter. In October 1987, Howard became an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and served in that position through 1994. He returned to Dechert in 1995. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B., cum laude) and the University of Pennsylvania Law School (J.D., cum laude), Howard is a member of the Pennsylvania Bar and admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Second and Third Circuits.
General Counsel, Center for Individual Rights
Darpana Sheth joined CIR as General Counsel in May 2025. She is a nationally recognized constitutional litigator with over two decades of experience serving in in leadership roles at other nonprofit organizations.
Before joining CIR, Darpana served for four years as Vice President of Litigation for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Prior to that, Darpana was a Senior Attorney with the Institute for Justice, where she also served as Director of the Institute’s National Initiative to End Forfeiture Abuse.
Before finding her calling as a public-interest attorney, Darpana served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York and worked in private practice as a litigation associate at the Manhattan law firm of Chadbourne & Parke, LLP. She also served as law clerk to the Honorable Jerome A. Holmes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
A native of Philadelphia, Darpana graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History. She earned her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.
David B. Smith, PLLC
David B. Smith has over 35 years of white collar criminal experience. He has litigated scores of cases and argued more than one hundred federal criminal appeals as a federal prosecutor and defense attorney, including extensive experience with civil and criminal litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Smith has been repeatedly named in the list of preeminent lawyers in the field of white collar criminal defense by Best Lawyers in America (2012-2021) and Virginia Super Lawyers (2009-2020), and has received the President’s Commendation for outstanding service from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in 1993, 1994, and 2004. He served for nine years on the Board of the NACDL and has been Chair of its Forfeiture Committee since 1990. He is also a Vice-Chair of its Amicus Committee.
For nearly a decade prior to entering private practice, Mr. Smith was a prosecutor in the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice and at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he was involved in complex white collar criminal investigations, trials, and appeals involving defense procurement fraud, congressional bribery, espionage, tax evasion, mail fraud, false claims and other crimes. In 1995-1996, Mr. Smith served as an Associate Independent Counsel in the investigation of Michael Espy, the former secretary of agriculture.
Mr. Smith is regarded as the foremost expert in the country on asset forfeiture law and practice. He is the author of the leading two-volume legal treatise on forfeiture, Prosecution and Defense of Forfeiture Cases (2020), published by Matthew Bender, and co-author of Civil RICO (2020), also published by Matthew Bender. He has testified before congressional committees several times with respect to forfeiture, restitution, and money laundering legislation. Mr. Smith has regularly counseled the Senate and House Judiciary Committees on forfeiture legislation, and was heavily involved in drafting the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000. He has also assisted the federal advisory committees in writing the procedural rules governing criminal and civil forfeiture proceedings. In 2000-2001, Mr. Smith was appointed by Senator Richard Shelby (R. Ala.), the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to serve as a Commissioner with the Judicial Review Commission on Foreign Asset Control.
Ronald N. Boyce Presidential Professor of Criminal Law and University Distinguished Professor of Law, The University of Utah College of Law
Paul G. Cassell is an internationally recognized legal scholar on criminal and civil justice, crime victims' rights, constitutional law, evidence, judicial process, and other legal issues. Cassell received a B.A. (1981) and a J.D. (1984) from Stanford University, where he graduated Order of the Coif and was President of the Stanford Law Review. He clerked for then-Judge Antonin Scalia when Scalia was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1984-85) and for Chief Justice Warren Burger of the United States Supreme Court (1985-86). Cassell then served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General with the U.S. Justice Department (1986-88) and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (1988 to 1991). Cassell joined the faculty at the College of Law in 1992, where he taught full-time until he was sworn in as a U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Utah in July 2002. In November 2007, he resigned his judgeship to return full-time to the College of Law to teach, write, and litigate concerning issues relating to crime victims' rights and criminal and civil justice reform. Professor Cassell has also published numerous law review articles in journals such as the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. He is a co-author of the nation's only law school textbook on crime victims' rights, Victims in Criminal Procedure (various editions, most recently in its fifth edition published in 2025). Professor Cassell has argued pro bono cases relating to criminal procedure and crime victims' rights before the United States Supreme Court, the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and D.C. Circuits (including the 5th and 11th Circuits en banc), several U.S. District Courts, the Utah Supreme Court, and the Arizona Supreme Court. In 2020, Cassell received the Ronald Wilson Reagan Public Policy Award - National Crime Victims' Service Award from the U.S. Department of Justice. Cassell is a member of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and an inaugural member of the Council on Criminal Justice. He is also an occasional blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy.
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