Leigha Simonton, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, recently announced that she will resign from the U.S. Department of Justice after 20 years of service, effective on Jan. 19, 2025.
“I am so proud to have served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for almost 18 years and then to have been chosen to lead this district—comprised of 100 counties and over 8 million people—as the United States Attorney,” she said. “There is nothing more important than the work of our outstanding women and men in this office and in North Texas law enforcement, and I will be forever grateful to have been a part of it.”
Simonton was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate and sworn into her position with the Northern District of Texas on Dec. 10, 2022.
During her time in office, she held hate-crime seminars for Jewish and Muslim community leaders and oversaw hate-crime prosecutions, including one that resulted in the sentencing of an Amarillo man for threatening to execute three rabbis.
Simonton announced on Jan. 19, 2023, the two-year sentence of Christopher Stephen Brown, who had pleaded guilty in September 2022 to making interstate threatening communications targeting three rabbis in New York. Brown had threatened that he would “execute” the rabbis and that he wanted to kill every rabbi he could find.
“Mr. Brown expressed vile antisemitism and threatened to commit despicable, violent acts against specific Jewish authorities. We will never stop protecting the Jewish community and other religious groups from such disturbing, hateful conduct,” Simonton said at the time. “We hope the sentence handed down today serves as reassurance of that to the victims, their loved ones and the greater Jewish community.”