Richard A. Powers

Richard A. Powers defends companies, boards of directors, and executives in high-stakes antitrust litigation and federal, state, and international government enforcement actions. As a senior official at the U.S. Department of Justice until fall 2022 and with over 13 years of experience as a prosecutor in the DOJ’s Antitrust and Criminal Divisions, Richard brings unique breadth and depth of up-to-date expertise to the most complex and sensitive corporate crises, cartel and other white collar cases and investigations, and antitrust litigation matters.  Richard also counsels clients on compliance initiatives designed to account for recent enforcement actions and policy developments. 

As the Antitrust Division’s Acting Assistant Attorney General throughout the first year of the Biden administration, Richard oversaw all antitrust civil and criminal enforcement actions. He served as the Antitrust Division’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Criminal Enforcement—the Department’s senior criminal antitrust enforcement official—for 4.5 years, leading over 100 prosecutors in investigating and prosecuting executives and companies for price fixing, fraud, obstruction of justice, and other crimes in federal courts across the country. Under Richard’s leadership, the Antitrust Division dramatically increased its criminal enforcement portfolio, litigating an unprecedented number of cases against corporations and senior executives and bringing landmark prosecutions across a wide spectrum of industries, including financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and government contracting. He supervised the Justice Department’s first criminal wage-fixing and no-poach prosecutions and its first criminal monopolization cases in half a century.

Richard played a key role in developing the current Department-wide and Antitrust Division corporate enforcement and individual accountability policies. He served as a member of the Deputy Attorney General’s Corporate Crime Advisory Group in 2021–22, contributing to significant changes in the Department’s approach to evaluating corporate compliance programs, imposing monitors, incentivizing voluntary self-disclosure, and assessing corporate cooperation, among other policy updates. Richard was the architect of recent comprehensive reforms to the Antitrust Division’s criminal enforcement policies, including 2022 updates to the Antitrust Division’s corporate leniency policy and 2019 changes to its evaluation of corporate compliance programs. 

Richard has worked closely with the leadership of U.S. federal and state enforcers and regulators, law enforcement agencies, and competition authorities around the world, including the European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, and Israel. He led the creation of the DOJ’s Procurement Collusion Strike Force, an international and nation-wide interagency partnership targeting antitrust and fraud offenses in public procurement.  

Richard’s other experience at the DOJ includes serving as a Trial Attorney for the Criminal Division Fraud Section’s Healthcare Fraud Unit in the Eastern District of New York and as a Trial Attorney for the Antitrust Division. In these roles he prosecuted cartel and fraud cases in the financial services industry, including bid rigging in the municipal bonds industry and various offenses related to the manipulation of the LIBOR, for which he received the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award.

Richard speaks regularly on antitrust and white collar enforcement at conferences throughout the country and around the world.

Richard served in the US Army as an infantry officer and received a Bronze Star and Combat Infantryman’s Badge for his service in Iraq.

Not admitted in New York; Admission pending