By Jay Weaver
When Miami U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe left his position a few days before Donald Trump became president in January, he kept quiet about his next career move.
But it comes as no surprise that after serving two years as South Florida’s most powerful federal law enforcement official, Lapointe has rejoined his former law firm, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.
“While my time as U.S. Attorney in Florida was the honor of my life, it feels really good to come home again,” said Lapointe, 57, a partner who specializes in corporate investigations and white-collar defense practices. He was previously a partner in Pillsbury’s Miami office from 2017 to 2022.
Lapointe, a Haitian-American immigrant who became the first Black lawyer to serve as U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, resigned from his position at a critical juncture. Soon after his Jan. 17 resignation, the Trump administration began replacing top prosecutors in 94 federal district offices and firing dozens of assistant U.S. attorneys who had been involved in prosecuting Trump in connection with the special counsel’s classified documents and Jan. 6 election interference cases.
Since starting his second term as president, Trump has orchestrated a Justice Department crackdown on prosecutors and other personnel associated with those now-dismissed criminal cases as well as on major Democratic-leaning law firms.
Lapointe, who assumed the U.S. Attorney’s position in January 2023 after being nominated by President Joe Biden, presided over about 250 prosecutors who zeroed in on government loan scams, false Medicare claims and nursing-school diploma mills, along with Venezuelan corruption, Ponzi schemes and developer Sergio Pino’s murder-for-hire plot targeting his wife.
However, one piece of unfinished business was the Miami federal trial of five men charged with conspiring in South Florida to kill Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. The case is set for trial in September — more than four years later after the assassination.
Five other defendants pleaded guilty during Lapointe’s term and were sentenced to life in prison. A sixth was sentenced for nine years.
When Lapointe stepped down as U.S. attorney, he was temporarily replaced by federal prosecutor Hayden O’Byrne. Trump’s official nominee for the position is Jason A. Reding Quiñones, a former federal prosecutor in the Miami office. Reding, 44, is awaiting U.S. Senate confirmation.
He’s serving as a Miami-Dade County judge, appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.
In February, the Miami Herald reported that Reding changed his last name to include Quiñones before he applied to be a county judge in late 2023. According to several sources, Reding received poor evaluations as a criminal prosecutor in the same federal office that he has been nominated to head.
Reding did not return an email and voice-mail message seeking comment on Monday.
This story was originally published April 28, 2025 at 2:30 PM.
Jay Weaver writes about federal crime at the crossroads of South Florida and Latin America. Since joining the Miami Herald in 1999, he’s covered the federal courts nonstop, from Elian Gonzalez’s custody battle to Alex Rodriguez’s steroid abuse. He was part of the Herald teams that won the 2001 and 2022 Pulitzer Prizes for breaking news on Elian’s seizure by federal agents and the collapse of a Surfside condo building killing 98 people. He and three Herald colleagues were 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalists for explanatory reporting on gold smuggling between South America and Miami.
