DOJ’s Mizelle Said to Push His Groomsman for White Collar Post

Justice Department Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle, a leading voice in overhauling law enforcement to meet President Donald Trump’s agenda, is moving to appoint his wedding groomsman and law school housemate as an official overseeing corporate fraud, said two people familiar with the matter.

The effort isn’t yet finalized to install Cody Herche as the DOJ criminal division’s deputy supervising the fraud and appellate sections, and the final decision lies with Attorney General Pam Bondi with the president’s approval, the people said.

Herche has served as a line attorney for DOJ’s civil division—where he investigated corporate crime—and then at the Securities and Exchange Commission, with court records showing limited prosecution experience and no criminal trials. He has no apparent history of supervising lawyers.

Herche would assume a key political role for white-collar enforcement and has told people at DOJ that he has the job, said the sources, who spoke about the personnel developments on condition of anonymity.

He has already joined Mizelle, with whom he graduated from Cornell Law School in 2013, at DOJ headquarters earlier this year.

Herche arrived as a counsel in the criminal division front office in recent weeks, several people said. The office oversees hundreds of trial attorneys working on market integrity and bribery cases, as well as priority initiatives such as tariff enforcement and combating cartels.

Mizelle has emerged as a public face of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation agenda, confrontations with the judiciary, and firings of civil servants who were deemed part of a weaponized DOJ.

When he was a senior Homeland Security official in Trump’s first term, Mizelle brought on another law school friend, Ian Brekke, to serve as the department’s deputy general counsel.

“You caught me,” Mizelle said in a statement to Bloomberg Law. “I associate with smart, hardworking professionals that have achieved incredible success in their careers. Perhaps I should socialize more with people who have spent their entire career as a beat reporter for the 46th most viewed publication in the US.”

The details about Mizelle and Herche’s friendship were confirmed by three lawyers who know both men.

White Collar Cases

Herche’s promotion to deputy assistant attorney general, if made official, would come as the department has sought to narrow the focus of white collar enforcement to cases involving cartels and transnational criminal organizations.

Left uncertain is how the administration plans to target misconduct within US companies. Trump has ordered a halt on foreign bribery investigations—which have since resumed with stricter DOJ oversight—and granted clemency to his supporters who’ve been convicted of wire fraud, bribery, and other white collar crimes.

DOJ has dismissed cases against corporate defendants with connections to the president.

The deputy position that Herche is in line for traditionally involves shepherding corporate enforcement policies. The job includes dealing with top DOJ leaders, as well as hundreds of section managers and trial attorneys based in DC, and 94 US attorney’s offices and other federal agencies partnering in white collar investigations.

Compared to predecessors, including in Trump’s first term, he has far less experience in criminal trials and leading prosecutors.

In a statement, a DOJ spokesman said, “Cody brings a wealth of experience to the Criminal Division from working at a prestigious trial litigation firm, seven years as a federal prosecutor and securities enforcement attorney, and clerkships with judges on the Southern District of New York and Second Circuit.”

Herche spent four years at the civil division’s consumer protection branch, participating in 12 cases and interviewing over 100 witnesses, a separate DOJ official said. Many of them involved sophisticated white collar criminal schemes, the official added. The consumer protection branch is being merged into the criminal fraud section that Herche would oversee.

As an associate at litigation boutique Kellogg Hansen, he supported a defense team representing iHeartMedia Inc. in a state court civil trial against lenders, the department official said.

At the consumer protection branch, he was the lead attorney in a criminal case against a company and its mid-level manager, according to court records, before he exited for the SEC in 2023.

In that case, the breakfast cereal manufacturer Kerry Inc. settled for nearly $20 million for unsanitary conditions, which at the time was the largest ever post-conviction criminal penalty in a food safety case.

The company’s quality assurance director pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor with no prison time in a case originally charged as a felony.

The DOJ official said Herche’s other cases were either transferred to colleagues when he left—before a charging decision—or ended under Herche’s watch without prosecution.

Prior appointees in the same role had experience as prosecutors with multiple criminal trials, fraud section supervisors, chiefs in US attorney’s offices, or as Big Law partners defending corporations against DOJ.

Matt Miner, who held the same position in Trump’s prior term, had tried 12 felony jury trials, been a white collar partner at two large firms, and served as staff director for Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, according to his LinkedIn profile.

At Cornell, Mizelle and Herche were on law review together, the masthead archives show. And they were jointly awarded the prize for best brief in a moot court competition, according to the spring 2012 issue of the Cornell Law Forum.