Gail Slater’s Interim DoJ Replacement: Five Things to Know

By Paul Steidler: Following today’s sudden resignation of Gail Slater as Assistant Attorney General (AAG) of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DoJ’s) Antitrust Division, press accounts report Mr. Omeed Assefi will fill the position on an interim basis.

Ms. Slater’s resignation comes a year to the day after she testified to the U.S. Senate at her confirmation hearing. Following a 78-19 confirmation vote, she was sworn in as AAG on March 12, 2025.

Here are five things of note about Mr. Assefi.

He served with AAG Slater and held her position before she was confirmed. Following Ms. Slater’s confirmation, Mr. Assefi served as “Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General with a focus on criminal enforcement.” The source of this information is a May 1, 2025, DoJ press release, which adds, “At the beginning of the second Trump Administration, Mr. Assefi served as the division’s Acting Assistant Attorney General.” Acting AAGs and Deputy AAGs do not require U.S. Senate confirmation.

Had several positions in the first Trump Administration. Mr. Assefi began working in the first Trump Administration as an Assistant Special Counsel in the White House Counsel’s Office, where he represented the Office of the President regarding the investigation into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. He later worked at the DoJ, where he helped supervise the Civil, Antitrust, and Civil Rights Divisions.

Crime Fighter. Mr. Assefi also served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, where “he prosecuted violent crime in the U.S. District Court as well as Superior Court.” In a January 29 DoJ press release about the first-ever $1 million award to a whistleblower, Ms. Assefi said, “Whistleblowers serve as the Justice System’s greatest disinfectant against criminal antitrust conspiracies.” He added that whistleblowers will continue to play an “indispensable role … in the Division’s criminal enforcement program.”

He is young. Mr. Assefi graduated from Trinity College in 2011 and later earned a law degree from American University.