ST. LOUIS — Jeff Jensen, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, has been appointed by U.S. Attorney General William Barr to review the criminal case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, The New York Times reported Friday.
Jensen is known locally for implementing changes in the federal prosecutor's office to combat violent crime.
Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, pleaded guilty to "willfully and knowingly" making "false, fictitious and fraudulent statements" to the FBI regarding conversations with Russia's ambassador. Sentencing has been delayed several times.
Barr has also installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, according to the Times. "Over the past two weeks, the outside prosecutors have begun grilling line prosecutors in the Washington office about various cases — some public, some not — including investigative steps, prosecutorial actions and why they took them," the paper reported, citing anonymous sources.
In January 2018, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions selected Jensen’s office to receive two additional assistant U.S. attorneys to focus exclusively on violent crime, bringing the total number of attorneys in the office to 57.
Jensen was a partner at Husch Blackwell when he was selected in July 2017 by the Trump administration to serve as U.S. attorney in St. Louis. He was one of three candidates for the position.
Before Husch, Jensen was a certified public accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers. He then became an FBI special agent in St. Louis for 10 years, and worked as a federal prosecutor for another decade, eventually being named executive U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri under U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway.
His awards include the Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent, a peer review ranking for attorneys, and The Founders Award from the FBI Agents Association.
Jensen received his bachelor’s degree in accounting from Indiana University and his law degree from Saint Louis University.
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