MACON – U.S. Attorney Peter D. Leary announced Wednesday that he will resign as the top-ranking federal law enforcement official for the Middle District of Georgia.

Leary said he’ll leave the office Saturday and will join an Atlanta-based law firm.

He is the third of Georgia’s three U.S. Attorneys to announce their resignations. Jill Steinberg, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, announced Wednesday she will resign effective Jan. 17, and Ryan Buchanan, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District, announced last week that he will resign effective Jan. 19.

The U.S. Attorneys are appointed by the president to lead prosecutions of federal crimes. 

All three resigning U.S. Attorneys will be succeeded on an interim basis by a current Assistant U.S. Attorney. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Shanelle Booker will succeed Leary. 

Incoming President Donald Trump will name new U.S. Attorneys for the positions sometime after he takes office. They will be subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

Leary’s Middle District of Georgia covers 70 counties in a swath from the South Carolina line to the southwest corner of the state and includes Valdosta, Moultrie, Tifton and Thomasville as well as Albany, Macon and Athens, among other cities.

Leary, who was raised in Watkinsville, began his federal career in 2007 working on complex civil litigation and with the intelligence community before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Georgia as a federal prosecutor in 2012 and ultimately becoming the 17^th presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia.

“I am honored to have served as the U.S. Attorney for the community that raised me, alongside some of the finest public servants in the country,” Leary said. “Every day the men and women of this office stand shoulder to shoulder with federal, state and local law enforcement partners to advance safety and promote justice.”

Under Leary’s leadership, the office deepened its complex criminal prosecutorial team to focus on the most significant and far-reaching safety concerns in the district, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a press release announcing Leary’s resignation. These efforts resulted in noteworthy convictions involving transnational criminal organizations and armed fentanyl traffickers while also preventing the distribution of illegal rapid-fire weapons and prioritizing child sexual abuse material and child exploitation investigations to track down predators and hold them accountable.

Leary guided the Middle District of Georgia through high-profile investigations such as the office’s first-ever Violent Crime in Aid of Racketeering prosecution involving the murders of three Athens, Georgia, residents; charging dozens of defendants allegedly tied to a Columbus, Georgia, criminal street gang distributing millions of dollars of drugs and guns; protecting the religious rights of Macon, Georgia, citizens threatened with violence; removing fentanyl and guns from the Albany, Georgia, region; actively working with law enforcement in Valdosta, Georgia, to get violent re-offenders with firearms off the streets; and working with law enforcement to use crime gun intelligence to obtain justice for the victim in an Oconee County, Georgia, homicide cold case.

Since Leary took office, additional resources have been directed towards the office’s growing Civil Division, which currently is at its largest size in the office’s history, the press release said. This growth — including employing a healthcare fraud investigator and a specialized Affirmative Civil Enforcement auditor — has resulted in the office being better able to pursue recovery on behalf of the United States, from seeking COVID fraud relief to recouping the highest civil healthcare fraud amounts since 2005.

Leary secured a full-time Civil Division Civil Rights investigator — the first position of its kind in any U.S. Attorney’s office in the country. With the help of this dedicated investigator, the office was able to engage in a multi-year investigation of the Georgia Department of Corrections, which recently concluded that the constitutional rights of prisoners are being violated by failing to protect them from widespread physical violence and harm.