In the two and a half years he spent in the role, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada Jason Frierson had a constant reminder of why he was in the job.
“As frequently as it was challenging sometimes, it was an honor every day to come to work and have something on my wall that says [that] the president of the United States asked me to do this,” Frierson said in an exit interview with The Nevada Independent.
Frierson, a Democrat who spent 10 years in the Assembly, including three years in the top leadership role of speaker, was nominated for the position by President Joe Biden in 2021. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April 2022 for a four-year term.
When presidents of the opposite party take power, U.S. attorneys are typically asked to leave or resign beforehand. Frierson resigned his position last week. He was the first Black man to hold the position in Nevada.
After three years away from the Legislature, Frierson is headed back to Carson City — as a lobbyist. He announced Wednesday that he’ll be joining Cornerstone Group, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm, to start an office in Carson City.
Frierson said he’s been gone from the Legislature long enough for it to serve as a sufficient “cooling off” period but he still maintains strong relationships with legislators. He’ll return to the Legislature familiar with its innermost workings — the opposite experience of his entry to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where he had to overcome the perception among staff that he was an outsider unfamiliar with the office.
The Department of Justice has 93 U.S. attorneys serving in various jurisdictions across the country to enforce federal law, from prosecuting federal cases in their region to defending the U.S. in civil litigation. Frierson, whose jurisdiction encompassed the entire state of Nevada, worked with various federal, state and local law enforcement agencies — including the Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigations and the U.S. Postal Service — to take on criminal and civil cases.
Although Frierson had previously worked as a public defender and prosecutor in Clark County, as well as deputy attorney general, being tapped to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office was a new experience for him. He said in his 20-plus-year career as an attorney in Nevada, he had never interacted with anybody at the U.S. Attorney’s Office until he was named its leader.
He sought to improve the office’s relationships and reputation with community stakeholders, law enforcement agencies and judges — a mission that, while he only had a few years to execute, he believes he accomplished.
“There have been some cases that predated myself that didn’t shine a great light on the department,” Frierson said, citing a lack of transparency in pretrial periods. “I was really determined to change the perception of the office and to make clear that we go above and beyond — to make sure that the process looks fair, regardless of who’s looking at it.”
For Frierson, that included annual tours with Nevada’s tribes to ensure cases involving Native Americans were not being neglected, regularly talking to high schoolers about career paths in law and attending community events in the hope that anyone’s first interaction with the office would not be in the aftermath of a crime.
As a former politician, Frierson said he knew his appointment would be met with some skepticism. In addition, he came in at a time when the Department of Justice — the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s parent organization — had come under intense political scrutiny from Republicans, who have accused the Biden administration of weaponizing its agencies to target the right, including investigating and prosecuting Trump himself and allegedly coordinating with the private sector to suppress conservative viewpoints.
Given the intense spotlight on federal law enforcement and his own political background, Frierson said he worked to ensure that none of the cases that the office’s prosecutors pursued had any appearance of politicization. Ironically, he said, his experience as speaker helped prepare him to try to accomplish a lot in a short period of time and handle the increasingly challenging political environment in which his office was operating.
“I was honored to spend two and a half years sitting down with [law enforcement],” Frierson said. “I think that they saw me as a political figure. I quickly got over that, and I assured them I wasn’t here to burn the building down, and they accepted that and embraced me.”
The work
Much of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s work involves prosecuting federal fraud cases and addressing gun, drug and human trafficking in partnership with relevant federal agencies. Frierson said he was particularly proud of the civil division’s work on asset forfeiture — in 2024, he said the office recovered $35 million for victims through seizing property involved in criminal activity.
Frierson said many of Nevada’s problems are similar to the rest of the country, from fentanyl trafficking to gun violence. He said the office made progress in creating structures to address human trafficking cases and expanded its bandwidth to tackle them, but that more work is needed.
“If I could have wished for anything, it would have been a little bit more time to collaborate with community partners on some initiatives to strengthen what we’re doing with respect to human trafficking,” Frierson said. “I certainly hope that my successor does and continues that momentum.”
Because U.S. attorneys’ terms are relatively short, much of the impact they can leave on their district comes through hiring. Frierson said the District of Nevada has historically been plagued by high turnover, which he set out to address. Of the approximately 55 attorneys working in the office, Frierson hired 24 — and he said he increased the diversity of the office and the number of attorneys who share his belief in prosecutorial discretion, or the power to pursue or not pursue cases depending on the circumstances of each one. (In recent years, some Republicans have tried to remove reform-minded prosecutors, preferring strict charging and maximum penalties.)
“I was proud to hire people who understand that seeking justice doesn’t always mean just locking people up and throwing away the key,” Frierson said. “It requires some creativity and looking at individual cases and emphasizing discretion, as opposed to just checking boxes.”
What’s next
President Donald Trump has not yet named a successor for Frierson. But Frierson said whoever it may be, he plans to offer to sit down with them and share practical advice, especially if the new U.S. attorney comes, like he did, from outside the department.
Frierson noted that many career attorneys in the office deal with lower salaries and far more scrutiny than they would in private practice or even for the Clark County District Attorney’s Office, but that they stick with the federal government because they’re passionate about the work.
“I can’t control who replaces me,” Frierson said. “I can only hope that they care about the people who work here.”
The role is likely to be reshaped by a Trump-era Justice Department pursuing mass deportation. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Justice leadership has ordered U.S. attorneys to investigate and prosecute local and state officials who do not aid in immigration enforcement — attempting to discourage the prosecutorial discretion that Frierson championed.
Still, Frierson said he would also encourage his successor to continue his efforts to improve outreach to communities across the state. In the meantime, First Assistant United States Attorney Sue Fahami, a former district attorney of White Pine County, as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Nevada.
U.S. attorneys often go into private practice after their time in public office; Frierson’s predecessor, Nick Trutanich, did so after his time in the District of Nevada during the Trump administration.
Frierson said his political background did end up serving him well at various points. The U.S. Attorney’s Office represented the Postal Service throughout the 2024 election, a busy time as they processed hundreds of thousands of mail ballots — a system Frierson was familiar with from his time in the Legislature.
And he entered the office with a “positive working relationship” with Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo from the days when Lombardo was Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department sheriff and Frierson was an assemblyman from Las Vegas — which carried over to the work Frierson did with current Sheriff Kevin McMahill.
Those relationships will power his lobbying role, too.
“I’ve told the governor, I don’t wish I were still in the Legislature,” Frierson said. “But I do think that he and I would have made decent partners in trying to work through challenges, because of that preexisting relationship.”
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