Sigal P. Mandelker, President Donald J. Trump’s pick to be Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), is being lauded by former officials contacted by The Cipher Brief.
The Senate Banking Committee has not set a date for hearings, but if confirmed, Mandelker would head the office that oversees the Treasury’s use of intelligence, sanctions and other tools to combat such security threats as terrorism, WMD proliferation, narcotics, and money laundering. Among the office’s programs is the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which identifies, tracks and pursues terrorists and their networks. The position receives relatively little attention but is responsible for critical tools to combat terrorism and protect national security.
Mandelker, a partner with the law firm of Proskauer Rose LLP, has held senior federal law enforcement positions, including Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department Criminal Division from 2006 to 2009 and Counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in 2005 and 2006. Also at Justice, she served as Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General and as Special Assistant to Chertoff when he was Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, where her focus was on counterterrorism and national security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Chertoff, speaking by phone, called Mandelker a “terrific” appointment, saying she is a “very accomplished attorney” with a “broad range of experience” in counterterrorism and law enforcement. Chertoff said she has “about as wide an array of relevant experiences as you could want.”
Others pointed to her broad experience in national security and counterterrorism, including cyber-related issues, and her background in cases where Treasury will need to work with Justice.
Stuart Levey, who served in the Treasury position from 2004 to 2011, under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said “I worked closely with Sigal at the Department of Justice and know firsthand that she brings a wealth of experience to this role.”
Adam Szubin, who has held a number of Justice and Treasury posts during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, including acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence agreed, saying
“I think very highly of her.” He described her as “exceptionally smart” and having “very deep experience in government and especially on the national security side.”
He noted that Mandelker worked on counterterrorism issues both at Justice and Homeland Security with “pretty significant oversight responsibilities” in terms of the importance and sensitivity of her projects and in terms of the number of people she was overseeing.
“In that sense, it’s a fantastic background to be coming in with,” he said.
If she’s confirmed, he said, he expects she will be “a very successful undersecretary.”
Juan Zarate, who was Assistant Treasury Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, as well as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Combating Terrorism during the George W. Bush administration, said she was “well-prepared to take on the leadership role at TFI.”
“Importantly, she appreciates the unique role that Treasury plays in driving U.S. strategy in the use of financial tools, information, regulation, sanctions, and suasion for our national security," said Zarate, who is now Chairman of Financial Integrity Network, a consulting firm that helps clients counter illicit financing threats.
Daniel Benjamin, Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department during the Obama administration, described the Treasury post as crucial to U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
“The undersecretary position at Treasury is one of the pivotal ones in the government’s counterterrorism community and has been since it was created in 2004,” he said, adding that “Cutting terrorists off from their donors, cracking down on institutions with unsound practices, pressing governments that aren’t living up to their counterterrorism obligations — these are all an essential part of the fight, and Treasury has been one of the outstanding success stories since 9/11.”
“That’s been true on sanctions enforcement as well, above all in the case of Iran. So it’s not surprising that when [former CIA Director] John Brennan needed a deputy at CIA, he picked David Cohen, who’d been in that job,” according to Benjamin, now the Norman E. McCulloch Jr. Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth.
Paul Pillar, a 28-year intelligence community veteran and former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, said the Treasury post “has become the principal senior job in the government overseeing the use of financial weapons for national security purposes.”
“The U.S. penchant for imposing economic sanctions, whether ostensibly for counterterrorist, counter-proliferation, or other purposes, has put the job and the portion of the Treasury Department that it oversees all the more at the center of action,” said Pillar, now a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies.
Szubin described the Treasury job as nonpartisan. He said it did not matter who he was talking with in Congress on issues. “They wanted the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to just see us succeed, they wanted to see us be aggressive, be effective.”
This position is “a really good place to be if you’re not a politically minded person,” he said. “I don’t see Sigal as looking to bring a political agenda to the job.”
Steve Hirsch is senior national security editor at The Cipher Brief. Follow him on Twitter @stevehirschnews.
