David S. Cohen (attorney)

Early life and education

Cohen is the son of a Boston physician. In high school he became friends with the son of Alan Dershowitz; the elder Dershowitz later recommended Cohen for his first job with Nathan Lewin. He graduated from Cornell University in 1985 and went on to receive a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989. After graduating from law school, Cohen served as a law clerk for federal judge Norman P. Ramsey for the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

Career

In 1999, Cohen began his first stint at the U.S. Treasury Department, serving in the General Counsel’s office as an aide to General Counsel Neal S. Wolin and then as Acting Deputy General Counsel. He worked there until July 2001, providing legal and policy advice to senior officials on all Treasury issues. According to the Treasury Department, he helped to craft legislation that would later form the basis of Title III of the USA PATRIOT Act, which updated the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act to give the government new tools to prevent money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

When he left the government, Cohen joined the Washington law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, now known as WilmerHale. He practiced there for seven years, becoming partner in 2004. His practice areas included complex civil litigation, white-collar criminal defense, internal investigations, and anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance. He was part of the team of lawyers representing a special committee of the Enron board that conducted the internal investigation into accounting fraud at Enron in 2001-02.

Treasury Department

In 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Cohen to be Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing in the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Senate confirmed him on May 1, 2009. Two years later, he was nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to be Under Secretary, becoming responsible for the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, a “700-person, $200 million-a-year counterterrorism office.”

According to the Treasury Department, Cohen directed the department’s “policy, enforcement, regulatory, and intelligence functions aimed at identifying and disrupting the lines of financial support to international terrorist organizations, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, narcotics traffickers, and other illicit actors posing a threat to [U.S.] national security.” As Under Secretary, he also oversaw the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which implements U.S. economic sanctions, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which develops and enforces U.S. anti-money laundering rules. Cohen has said that “financial measures have become far more powerful tools of statecraft, and their effects are multiplied in a world defined by economic interdependence.”

For his role in designing sanctions against Iran and targeting ISIS’s finances, he was described as “President Obama’s favorite combatant commander” and as the administration’s “financial Batman.”

In October 2014, the New York Times referred to Cohen as the “first line of attack against ISIS” and a “fixture in Mr. Obama’s situation room.” That week, he spoke at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explaining why ISIS poses a “different terrorist financing challenge” from al-Qaeda and describing the Treasury Department’s plan to “undermine [its] financial strength.”

During his time at Treasury, Cohen regularly testified before Congress, often about the sanctions on Iran and the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. In a 2015 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Cohen called the Iran sanctions “the most effective set of financial and economic sanctions in history,” which “isolated [Iran] from the international financial system, … severely constrained its overall economy,” and “encourage[d] Iran to come to the negotiating table.” In addition to the Iran sanctions, Cohen was also “at the center of the administration’s escalating sanctions on Russia” over its intervention in Ukraine.

Cohen frequently spoke about the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence’s financial regulatory functions. In March 2014, he delivered a speech about the risk that virtual currencies such as Bitcoin may be used for illicit financial purposes, emphasizing the importance of both “fostering innovation and ensuring transparency.” He often highlighted the Treasury Department’s anti-money laundering policies, including a rule requiring financial institutions to identify the beneficial owner of their clients.

CIA

In 2015 Cohen was appointed Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Some observers noted that his appointment reflected the government’s belief that financial intelligence had become increasingly important to national security. Others speculated that the Obama administration selected Cohen because it wanted an outsider who had no connection to past incidences of torture and extraordinary rendition.

At the CIA, Cohen helped oversee the agency’s restructuring, billed as a “modernization.” In a 2015 speech at Cornell University, Cohen described the modernization as a response to “the marked increase in the range, diversity, complexity and immediacy” of national security threats and “the unprecedented pace and impact of technological advancements.” In particular, Cohen discussed the CIA’s creation of a new Directorate of Digital Innovation, which focuses on upgrading the agency’s use of digital technology, helping clandestine officers maintain effective cover, and defending the CIA against cyber attacks.

In April 2016, Cohen spoke publicly about the relationship between the CIA and Congress, which had become tense following the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s "Study on CIA Detention and Interrogation". In a speech at NYU Law School, he noted the challenges of maintaining public accountability over a government agency that necessarily works in secret, and described the mechanisms that allow for Congressional oversight. He characterized the relationship between the CIA and Congress as “a robust, free-flowing, continuous and respectful exchange of perspectives” marked by “daily interaction and ongoing oversight.”

That month, he also appeared on the Charlie Rose show. He discussed the U.S. campaign against ISIS; North Korea’s nuclear program, which he called a “significant threat”; and the CIA’s use of digital methods of intelligence collection. He stated that Russia had intervened in the Syrian civil war because it worried about “losing its investment” in the Assad regime.

According to the Washington Post, in the wake of the 2015 San Bernardino attack, Cohen assembled a group of Muslim CIA employees to talk about Islamophobia, emphasizing that the agency had “zero tolerance” for it.

Personal life

Cohen is married with two children, one of whom is an officer in the United States Navy and one of whom is in college. He met his wife while both were students at Yale Law School. Cohen was described as "very consciously Jewish" by his former employer, Nathan Lewin. In a recent Washington Post interview, Cohen said he attends yoga classes with his wife every Sunday and makes homemade pasta.