Jessie Kong Liu (born January 2, 1973) is an American attorney who was the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. She previously worked as deputy general counsel at the U.S. Treasury and served at the Justice Department. In 2020, she joined the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom as a partner. Education and legal career Liu was born in Kingsville, Texas, of a Taiwanese immigrant family. She received her Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, from Harvard University in 1995, with a major in literature, and completed her J.D. at Yale Law School in 1998. She clerked for Carolyn Dineen King of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1998 to 1999. Liu worked as an associate at Jenner & Block from 1999 to 2002, as a partner at the same firm from 2009 to 2016, and as a partner at Morrison & Foerster from 2016 to 2017. Liu served as Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia from 2002 to 2006. She worked at the United States Department of Justice during the administration of President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009. Her roles included deputy chief of staff in the National Security Division, counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, and Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division. Liu worked for the transition team of President-elect Donald Trump, and in 2017 became deputy general counsel at the United States Department of the Treasury. In June 2017, President Trump nominated Liu to become the next United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, the country's largest U.S. Attorney's office, with more than three hundred prosecutors. Liu was confirmed by the Senate by voice vote in September 2017. While serving as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Liu received criticism from residents and local lawmakers for her record of not prosecuting hate crimes. An investigation by The Washington Post found that under her leadership, hate crime prosecutions and convictions in D.C. were at their lowest point in at least a decade. After much public pressure, her office made more prosecutions for hate crimes in 2019 than it did in all of 2018 and 2017 combined. In March 2019, President Donald Trump said he would nominate Liu to become United States Associate Attorney General, but she withdrew her name from consideration later that month because the Republican-controlled Senate