Craig H. Missakian

Craig H. Missakian was appointed as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California in May 2025.  Mr. Missakian serves as the chief federal law enforcement officer in the Northern District of California, home to nearly nine million residents in 15 counties spanning from Del Norte in the north to Monterey in the south, more than 300 public companies centered in Silicon Valley, and three major metropolitan areas in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose.

From 2001 to 2010, Mr. Missakian served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California, handling multiple high-profile public corruption, organized crime, and cybercrime cases.  Mr. Missakian and his co-counsel secured a conviction and multiple guilty pleas in United States v. Chi Mak, an espionage case involving an engineer who over several decades stole classified and highly sensitive U.S. military secrets for the People’s Republic of China.  He received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service, one of the Department of Justice’s highest honors, for his work on the case.  Mr. Missakian also led a multi-year investigation into a nationwide health care fraud scheme involving over $100 million in fraudulent Medicare claims.  

From 1994 to 1997, he served as a Deputy District Attorney with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, where he prosecuted hundreds of cases, including murder, assault, narcotics, sex crimes, gang-related violence, and domestic abuse, and tried over 50 jury and bench trials.

From 2014 to 2016, Mr. Missakian worked as Deputy Chief Counsel on the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation into the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans.

Mr. Missakian also has extensive civil litigation experience, having represented clients in the areas of complex commercial litigation, qui tam litigation, employment, real estate, and entertainment.  Immediately prior to his return to the Department of Justice, Mr. Missakian worked in private practice at his own firm, where he specialized in high-profile white collar criminal defense, commercial litigation, corporate and government investigations.

Mr. Missakian earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude, from the University of Southern California and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.