Juan Zarate

The Honorable Juan Zarate is the global co-managing partner and chief strategy officer for the global consulting firm, K2 Integrity. He is also the co-founder and Chair of the Board of Consilient, an innovative fintech.

Zarate is the lead independent Trustee on the board of Northwestern Mutual. He serves as treasurer on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy; the board of Guardian Space Technology Solutions; and since 2014, Zarate has served as an independent adviser to Coinbase, the largest virtual asset service provider in the United States. He is also a member of the Smith Richardson Grants Committee.

He is the chairman and co-founder of the Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); and an advisor to the National Security Institute, the Harvard National Security Journal, FDD’s Center on Cyber & Technology Innovation, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

He was a visiting lecturer on law at the Harvard Law School for eight years and is a published author, including his books “Treasury’s War” (2013) and “Forging Democracy” (1994).

Zarate was appointed by Pope Francis twice to sit on the board of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority; sat on the boards of Boston Dynamics and Cambridge Quantum Computing North America; and for over a decade, he served as an independent U.S. advisor on HSBC’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee and on HSBC’s Group Risk Committee. For fourteen years, he was a senior national security analyst for CBS News and later NBC News.

Zarate has served on multiple commissions, including the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Economic Security; CSIS Commission on Countering Violent Extremism; CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security; the CFR’s Independent Task Force on North Korea; the Center for A New American Security’s Future of U.S. Sanctions Task Force; and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism.

Zarate served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009, the nation’s fifth “counterterrorism czar.” In that role, he was responsible for developing and implementing the U.S. counterterrorism strategy as well as policies related to weapons of mass destruction/terrorism, transnational security threats, maritime security, international energy infrastructure protection, hostage-taking, anti-money laundering, kleptocracy, and transnational organized crime. He was responsible for conceiving and leading major initiatives in the post 9/11 period, including the establishment of the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT).

He was the first ever Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes. In this role, he led the post-9/11 anti-money laundering and sanctions regime expansion in the United States; helped develop the international standards for AML/CFT and proliferation finance; supervised the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the Treasury’s Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture (TEOAF); and drove the innovative use of the Treasury’s national security–related powers. Zarate ultimately led the establishment of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI). He has also led some of the largest asset recovery ventures in history, including the return of over $3 billion in Iraqi assets. He was awarded the Treasury Medal.

Zarate is a former federal terrorism prosecutor prior to 9/11, serving on the prosecution teams in the East Africa bombings and USS Cole cases, among others. He is magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School. At Harvard College, he won the John P. Reardon Award, as the top male student athlete. He was a Rotary Scholar at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. In 2002, he was inducted into Mater Dei High’s School’s Ring of Honor.