Derek Ettinger

Derek Ettinger is an assistant chief in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit of the Justice Department's criminal division fraud section. He joined the fraud section in January 2015, and was promoted to assistant chief in January 2021. 

Ettinger received his undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona in 1997. He earned a PhD in philosophy from Brown University in 2005 and published a dissertation titled "Making Sense of Things". He received his law degree in 2008 from Columbia University, where he was a staff editor at Columbia Human Rights Law Review.

Between 2008 and 2013, Ettinger worked as an associate in the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton. He took time out in 2009 to work as a law clerk for a year to Judge Margaret McKeown of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He also spent time in 2012 working as a law clerk in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

He was also an investigative auditor on the now defunct Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, which New York Governor Andrew Cuomo created in July 2013 to probe corruption in state government, political campaigns and elections. Cuomo disbanded the commission in March 2014 as part of a deal for ethics reforms that the legislature negotiated into the state budget.

Ettinger served in 2014 as assistant counsel for Benjamin Lawsky, the former head of New York's Department of Financial Services.

In 2015 while at the DOJ, Ettinger prosecuted a case in which a former Russian nuclear energy official was sentenced to 48 months in prison for a money-laundering conspiracy involving FCPA violations.