Former SEC chair Jay Clayton tapped as Wall Street’s top cop

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Donald Trump will nominate Jay Clayton, the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as US attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the most prestigious prosecutorial posts with oversight of Wall Street.

“Jay is a highly respected business leader, counsel, and public servant,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday. He said Clayton had done “an incredible job” as SEC chair.

It was one of several nominations for top legal posts that Trump put forward on Thursday, as the president-election moves quickly to shape his new administration.

He picked Todd Blanche, a former federal prosecutor who was the president-elect’s defence attorney during this year’s “hush money” trial in New York, to be assistant attorney-general at the Department of Justice.

Trump also nominated Blanche’s co-counsel Emil Bove to the post of principal associate deputy attorney-general and acting deputy attorney-general, while Blanche is in process of being confirmed by the Senate.

John Sauer, who successfully argued for Trump in a case before the US Supreme Court over presidential immunity, was nominated as solicitor-general, which will put him at the front of the administration’s cases before the high court. Sauer was previously solicitor-general for the state of Missouri.

The moves come a day after Trump nominated Matt Gaetz, the incendiary former Florida congressman who practised law briefly before joining Congress, as US attorney-general. That pick shook Washington’s legal community over concerns that Gaetz could, if confirmed, use law enforcement against the president-elect’s political opponents.

By contrast, the latest batch of nominations come from more conventional legal backgrounds. All have close ties to Trump.

During his tenure at the SEC Clayton, a veteran Wall Street lawyer, had sought to focus his enforcement agenda on cases linked to harm against retail investors, and oversaw a deregulatory drive aimed at making it easier for companies to raise capital.

Clayton, who is a senior policy adviser at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and independent chair of Apollo Global Management’s board of directors, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In recent years, under the leadership of US attorney Damian Williams, the Southern District of New York has won the convictions of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and Archegos’ Bill Hwang, among other high-profile white collar criminals.

If confirmed, Clayton would take over an office that is still prosecuting rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Democratic New York mayor Eric Adams, who faces numerous corruption allegations.

Trump has expressed sympathy for Adams, saying he had been targeted by “lunatic” prosecutors. Adams, who maintains his innocence, has in turn been reluctant to criticise the president-elect.

While the US attorney for the Southern District of New York answers to the attorney-general, the office has a long history of acting relatively independently, at arm’s length from Washington.

It previously declined to prosecute Trump over campaign finance violations relating to his payments to pay off a porn actor in the run-up to the 2016 election, before the Manhattan district attorney decided to bring similar state charges.

Trump has not yet named his selection to run the SEC.