The Justice Department on Wednesday tapped Theo Stamos, a longtime prosecutor, to lead a key U.S. attorney’s office in Virginia that has been rocked by staff turnover amid President Donald Trump’s aggressive moves to punish his critics.
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Stamos was named first assistant U.S. attorney, the second-highest-ranking position in the Eastern District of Virginia, according to a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office. She will automatically become the acting U.S. attorney under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
That U.S. attorney position has been vacant for months amid a Trump administration stalemate with the district’s federal judges over who gets to appoint the top prosecutor. The position usually requires Senate confirmation, but the Trump administration has bypassed that process in several key U.S. attorney’s offices that are being led by temporary appointees.
Stamos is a longtime prosecutor in Virginia state courts who was twice elected commonwealth’s attorney for Arlington County and Falls Church, serving from 2012 to 2019 as a Democrat who distanced herself from the party’s criminal justice reform agenda. Stamos began working at the prosecutor’s office in 1987.
She was unseated in a 2019 primary by a progressive challenger, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, who is currently serving in the Northern Virginia district.
In a late-career twist, Stamos then joined a Republican administration. She was a top adviser to Jason S. Miyares (R) throughout his four-year term as Virginia attorney general. In a LinkedIn post, Stamos called it “the highlight of my nearly 40 years in law enforcement.” Miyares lost his reelection bid last year.
Stamos is expected to start at the U.S. attorney’s office Monday. She declined to comment. The appointment was first reported by Bloomberg Law.
The Eastern District of Virginia office, known for its sensitive portfolio of national security cases, employs about 300 lawyers and staff in Alexandria, Newport News, Norfolk and Richmond.
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In September, Trump forced out the interim U.S. attorney he had initially appointed, Erik S. Siebert, setting off a chain of firings, resignations and turmoil in the office’s leadership ranks over the ensuing months.
Siebert had declined to pursue criminal charges against two of the president’s perceived foes, former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), after career prosecutors found there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing in both cases.
The president then named Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer of his who had no experience as a prosecutor, to lead the U.S. attorney’s office. Halligan got grand juries to indict Comey and James, but a federal judge threw out those indictments, ruling that Halligan had been illegally appointed as the district’s interim U.S. attorney.
Halligan stepped down in January amid harsh criticism from one of the district’s federal judges, David Novak, who said she clung to the office for weeks after the ruling that disqualified her from holding it.
The federal judges in the Eastern District of Virginia then appointed James W. Hundley as the new U.S. attorney in February, under a provision of the law that allows the court to fill the vacancy in some circumstances. The appointment did not last long, however. Todd Blanche, now the acting attorney general, fired Hundley within hours.
The Justice Department has resisted judges appointing U.S. attorneys without getting the Trump administration’s sign-off. When the district judges of the federal court in western Washington state appointed a U.S. attorney to fill a vacancy there on Wednesday, the administration promptly fired him, again within hours.
For most of this year, the Eastern District of Virginia office has been run by the most senior official there, Frank Bradsher, who was enlisted to provide help from a U.S. attorney’s office in North Carolina last year. His title is executive assistant U.S. attorney.
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Perry Stein contributed to this report.
