Source: Office of United States Attorneys
MINNEAPOLIS – Joseph H. Thompson, who has served as a federal prosecutor for sixteen years, has been appointed by President Donald J. Trump to serve as the Acting United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota.
“I am honored and humbled to be asked to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota,” said Mr. Thompson. “I look forward to continuing our office’s work combatting violent crime, the scourge of fentanyl and other deadly drugs, and the shocking and unacceptable levels of fraud in our state government programs.”
Mr. Thompson has served as a federal prosecutor for more than sixteen years, first in the Northern District of Illinois and since 2014 in the District of Minnesota. In that time, Mr. Thompson has investigated and prosecuted hundreds of cases, many of which involve matters of national and international significance. Most recently, Mr. Thompson has served as the Chief of the Fraud & Public Corruption section. In this role, Mr. Thompson has overseen an unprecedented effort by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to prosecute fraud against state and federal government programs, including as the lead prosecutor in the Feeding Our Future investigation, which has been recognized by the Department of Justice as the largest Covid-19 fraud in the United States.
From 2023 to 2024, Mr. Thompson served on the Special Counsel team investigating the mishandling of classified documents found at the Penn-Biden Center in Washington, DC, and the personal residence of President Joseph R. Biden in Wilmington, Delaware.
Mr. Thompson previously served as a federal prosecutor in Chicago from 2009 to 2014, where he prosecuted street gangs, drug cartels, corrupt politicians, and domestic terrorists.
Mr. Thompson has tried more than twenty jury trials in every major area of federal prosecution. Mr. Thompson has briefed and argued more than a dozen cases before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Mr. Thompson has received numerous awards and accolades for his work as a federal prosecutor, including the 2024 Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service for his work as the lead prosecutor on one of the largest elder fraud cases in the country.
For more than a decade, Mr. Thompson taught law school, including an advanced criminal law course at the University of Minnesota Law school. Mr. Thompson has also taught trial advocacy to new AUSAs from around the country at the Department of Justice’s National Advocacy Center in South Carolina.
Prior to becoming a federal prosecutor, Mr. Thompson worked in private practice in Chicago. He also served as a law clerk for the Honorable Rebecca R. Pallmeyer in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and for the Supreme Court of the Republic of Palau.
Mr. Thompson was born and raised in Minnesota. He earned a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Gustavus Adolphus College, and his law degree, with distinction, from Stanford Law School.