Monday, March 23, 2009

Geithner Alas Gets a Deputy: Neal Wolin

Neal Wolin is the nominee for deputy Treasury secretary; Lael Brainard is the nominee for undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs; Stuart Levey is nominee for undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.
Reuters: President Barack Obama said on Monday he would nominate veteran Treasury Department employee Neal Wolin as deputy Treasury secretary, the White House said in a statement.
Wolin, who served as general counsel at Treasury from 1999 to 2001, was one of three senior treasury nominees named by Obama.
Wolin's bio:
Neal S. Wolin is President and Chief Operating Officer for Property and Casualty operations of The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. He is also a member of the company's Office of the Chairman.

Previously, he served as executive vice president and general counsel at The Hartford where he oversaw the company's legal, government affairs, corporate relations, communications and marketing functions, as well as the property and casualty's insurance runoff operations. He joined the company in March 2001.

Until January 2001, Wolin served as the general counsel of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, a position for which he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and appointed by President Clinton in November, 1999. As general counsel, he was the chief legal officer of the Department and provided legal and policy advice to Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Summers and senior Department officials on the full range of issues under Treasury's jurisdiction. In January 2001, Secretary Summers awarded Wolin the Alexander Hamilton Award, the highest honor given by the Secretary of the Treasury. From 1995 to 1999, Wolin served as the deputy general counsel of the Treasury Department.

Prior to joining the Treasury Department, Wolin served in the White House as the executive assistant to National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and then Deputy National Secretary Advisor Samuel R. Berger. Prior to that, Wolin was the deputy legal adviser of the National Security Council, providing foreign affairs and national security legal advice to the National Security Advisor and the Counsel to the President. Wolin has also served as special assistant to three directors of Central Intelligence: William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey.

Before joining the federal government, Wolin practiced law in Washington D.C. with the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering, and as law clerk for United States District Judge Eugene H. Nickerson in the Eastern District of New York.

He has been an adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, an adjunct assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, and a Visiting Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Wolin received a B.A. degree in history summa cum laude from Yale College. After college, he studied at Balliol College at the University of Oxford as a Charles and Julia Henry Fellow, earning a Master of Science degree in Development Economics. He received a J.D. degree from Yale Law School, where he was a Coker Teaching Fellow in Constitutional Law.

Wolin is a member of the bars of Connecticut, Illinois, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Board of Overseers of the RAND Corporation's Institute for Civil Justice, the Board of Regents of the University of Hartford and the Board of Directors of the Appleseed Foundation. He is also a James W. Cooper Fellow of the Connecticut Bar Foundation. Mr. Wolin was appointed by President Clinton to be a member of the President's Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, on which he served 1999-2000.