Patrick Fitzgerald

Patrick J. "Pat" Fitzgerald (born December 22, 1960) is a lawyer in Chicago, Illinois. He joined, as partner, the Chicago office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom as of October 29, 2012. For more than a decade, until June 30, 2012, Fitzgerald was the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Prior to his appointment, he served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for 13 years and as Chief of the Organized Crime-Terrorism Unit since December 1995, where he participated in the prosecution of United States v. Usama Bin Laden, et al., United States v. Abdel Rahman, et al., and United States v. Ramzi Yousef Rahman, et al. As special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Special Counsel, Fitzgerald was the federal prosecutor in charge of the investigation of the Valerie Plame Affair, which led to the prosecution and conviction in 2007 of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby for perjury. As a federal prosecutor, he led a number of high-profile investigations, including ones that led to convictions of Illinois Governors Rod Blagojevich and George Ryan, media mogul Conrad Black, several aides to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in the Hired Truck Program, and Chicago detective and torturer Jon Burge.