Fajardo steps down as U.S. attorney in Miami after leading office through pandemic
Barely on the job as the new U.S. attorney in Miami, Ariana Fajardo Orshan confronted her first crisis in the fall of 2018 — a sensational terrorism investigation of a homeless man who was sending crudely made pipe bombs in the mail from South Florida to politicians in the Northeast.
Her office, along with the FBI, jumped all over it. But as the probe generated national headlines, she received back-to-back phone calls from the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and the deputy attorney general in Washington, D.C.
“Stand down,” they both told her, the case would be prosecuted by the Southern District of New York, aka the “sovereign district” because of its long tradition of power and independence among the 93 U.S. attorney’s offices in the country.
“They grabbed the case,” Fajardo told the Miami Herald Wednesday. She was nominated by President Donald Trump, became the first woman to serve as U.S. attorney in Miami, and is now leaving office Friday following Trump’s defeat to Democrat Joe Biden in November. Like other top federal prosecutors nationwide, Fajardo, 48, must step down as part of the transition in presidential power.
For Fajardo, a former Miami-Dade circuit judge and assistant state prosecutor, the New York power play was an immediate “sore spot” for the federal newcomer. She argued that the perpetrator was local and his mail bombs were all made here, so the case belonged in South Florida, but the Southern District of New York outmaneuvered her by opening a grand jury first to make the terrorism case. Some of the mail bombs were received by former President Barack Obama and other politicians in D.C., New York and elsewhere.
Fajardo’s tenure as U.S. attorney has been met with far more unexpected challenges, from a federal government shutdown to the COVID-19 pandemic.
After the Cesar Sayoc pipe-bomb case was taken over by New York prosecutors, the federal government shut down and left her staff of more than 500 prosecutors and assistants wondering when they would receive a paycheck or be furloughed as non-essential employees. The 35-day closure, lasting from late December 2018 to late January 2019, would be the longest in U.S. government history.
Fajardo had only been on the job for a few months and was still trying to learn employee names, federal criminal codes and the bureaucratic structure of the sprawling office extending from Key West to Fort Pierce. “People were working but they were not getting paid,” she recalled, saying it was a morale low point for the office.
But as the office recovered, Fajardo said she set out to change the hierarchy and hiring of the long male-dominated U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida — at first with input from the outgoing U.S. Attorney Ben Greenberg, who worked for a brief time as her first assistant, and then by another career prosecutor, Tony Gonzalez, who replaced him.
Fajardo, who was raised in a Cuban family in Hialeah, handpicked a dozen women and men who were Hispanic, Black, Asian, Indian and white to fill executive and supervisory positions. “I knew I wanted a greater representation in our office that reflected the community,” she said.
Fajardo, who acknowledged she doesn’t like meetings, collaborated with Gonzalez, a techie type, and other advisors to develop a methodical system of hiring new assistant U.S. attorneys — going beyond tapping only the best students from the nation’s top law schools and federal clerkships.
Her team recruited civil and criminal lawyers with trial experience in either law firms or the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, hiring more than 90 new prosecutors over the past two years. Among the new hires: two Haitian Americans, which, though a small number, was significant because of their lack of presence in the office. Fajardo also recruited candidates from the conservative legal group known as the Federalist Society. It gained tremendous influence during the Trump administration.
During that same two-year period, dozens of veteran prosecutors left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami because of retirement or joining major law firms — including Michael Nadler, who had been the lead prosecutor in a series of massive Venezuelan money laundering cases.
Fajardo created a new money laundering section outside the traditional realm of narcotics to take aim at the tainted millions flowing into South Florida’s banking, business and real estate sectors from foreign corruption and embezzlement. She said the office’s bench in this area had to be rebuilt around financial crimes experts because of the loss of Nadler and other key prosecutors in recent years.
Fajardo said she recognized the need for a special money laundering section just by looking at all the new condo high-rises from Miami to Aventura. “All these buildings are going up, but who are all these buyers?” she recalled thinking. “Nobody seems to be living in them. They’re all dark at night.”
As she gained her footing as U.S. attorney, Fajardo and her office of about 250 lawyers and 250 support staff would be upended by the coronavirus pandemic in March of last year, much like the rest of society that feared the threat of the deadly respiratory disease.
“It was overwhelming,” Fajardo said. “Our number one concern was sending people home and keeping them safe.”
They not only all had to work from home for months — though the U.S. Attorney’s Office remained open for some business — they were forced to adapt to a new world of technology, such as using only laptops and conducting remote conference meetings. The Justice Department forbids workers from taking home their desktop computers, which store secret and sensitive information on hard drives.
Worse still, the federal courthouse, while remaining open for incremental case developments, shut down for all trials. Moreover, the grand jury was put on hold. Newly filed cases focused on defendants who committed violent crimes, child porn offenses on the internet or fraud against COVID-19 business relief programs. But those cases had to be charged by criminal complaint, not the grand jury. As a result, a backlog of hundreds of indictments developed through November, when the grand jury partly reopened twice a week only in the federal courthouse in Miami.
Fajardo said her first assistant, Gonzalez, not only helped with the overall logistics but he also collaborated with statistical experts to develop a database on the daily and weekly risks of the COVID-19 threat and shared information on cases, hospitalizations and testing with the court system, federal judges and law enforcement agencies.
Gonzalez, who will replace his boss as the new acting U.S. attorney, said that since September about one-third of the staff has returned to working at the office at the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building at 99 N.E. Fourth St. Also significant, with the grand jury resuming in November, it has returned 300 indictments with 450 defendants.
“We’re caught up,” Gonzalez said. “We have worked through the backlog.”
While a couple of civil trials might be held this spring, criminal trials probably won’t resume until the fall.
Meanwhile, Fajardo, who practiced family law with her husband earlier in her career, plans to take some time off and may try to return to the Miami-Dade bench as a judge. That would require an appointment by the governor or running for election.
“I loved this job,” she said of her tenure as U.S. attorney. “It will be difficult to top this.”
Already, there are more than a half-dozen South Florida lawyers said to be interested in becoming the next U.S. attorney, to be picked by President Biden. They are: Jacqueline Arango, Markenzy Lapointe, Andres Rivero, Matthew Dates, Cristina Perez Soto, Michael Hantman and Dave Aronberg.
This story was originally published March 26, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
