U.S. Attorney for South Florida to resign before Trump's inauguration

Angie DiMichele, South Florida Sun-Sentinel on Jan 6, 2025

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Markenzy Lapointe announced Monday evening his resignation as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

Lapointe, nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2022, in a prepared statement said his resignation will take effect at 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 17.

President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration will be Jan. 20. It is customary for U.S. attorneys to resign during a presidential transition. Lapointe replaced Juan Antonio Gonzalez, who took over in 2021 after Trump-nominated Ariana Fajardo Orshan’s resignation. Several other U.S. attorneys across the country also announced their resignations Monday.

The Miami-based Southern District has been in the national spotlight with Trump’s classified documents case and the ongoing prosecution of Ryan Wesley Routh, accused in an assassination attempt of Trump at his golf course near West Palm Beach.

The district covers nine counties, from Indian River County south to Monroe County, with branch offices in West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Fort Pierce.

Lapointe, 57, became the first Haitian-born American attorney to hold the position and had ties to the South Florida region. After immigrating from Haiti when he was a teenager, he lived in Miami-Dade County’s Liberty City neighborhood, which at the time was “an urban area with high crime and associated problems,” he said in the statement. He graduated from Miami Edison Senior High School and had also attended Miami Dade College before earning his law and finance degrees at Florida State University, according to his biography on the office’s website.

“Given where I started, it has been uniquely meaningful to hold a role so central to the Department of Justice’s mission of supporting our collective well-being through the exercise of the rule of law,” Lapointe said.

Most recently before his appointment in 2022, Lapointe was a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, in its Miami office, where he co-chaired the firm’s Advancement of Diverse Attorneys Committee. Early in his career, Lapointe worked as a law clerk for former Florida Supreme Court Justice Harry Lee Anstead from 1999 to 2001, according to his biography.

Lapointe was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida from 2002 to 2006, where he litigated cases including drug- and gun-related crimes and bank and mortgage fraud. He then worked for the next 10 years as a litigation associate and partner for Boies Schiller Flexner LLP from 2006 to 2017, until he jointed Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.

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