Juan C. Zarate

The Honorable Juan Zarate is the chairman and co-founder of the Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

Juan currently serves as global co-managing partner and chief strategy officer for K2 Integrity and is co-founder and chair of the board of Consilient, a fintech company. He is the author of Treasury’s War (2013) and Forging Democracy (1994).

Juan served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009, where he developed U.S. counterterrorism strategy and led initiatives such as the establishment of the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT). He was the first assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, leading the post-9/11 expansion of the U.S. anti-money laundering and sanctions regime, overseeing the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and Treasury’s Executive Office for Asset Forfeiture, and ultimately establishing the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) — work that included some of the largest asset recovery efforts in history, such as the return of over $3 billion in Iraqi assets, for which he was awarded the Treasury Medal. Earlier in his career, he was a federal terrorism prosecutor and served on the prosecution teams for the East Africa bombings and USS Cole cases.

Juan is a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an advisor to the National Security Institute, the Harvard National Security Journal, and FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI), and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

He is also the lead independent trustee on the board of Northwestern Mutual, treasurer of the National Endowment for Democracy, and a board member of Guardian Space Technology Solutions. Since 2014, he has served as an independent advisor to Coinbase. He was a visiting lecturer on law at Harvard Law School for eight years.

Juan was twice appointed by Pope Francis to the board of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority, previously served on the boards of Boston Dynamics and Cambridge Quantum Computing North America, and for over a decade was an independent U.S. advisor on HSBC’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee and Group Risk Committee.

For 14 years, he was a senior national security analyst for CBS News, and later NBC News. His commission service includes the CFR Task Force on Economic Security, the CFR Independent Task Force on North Korea, the CSIS Commission on Countering Violent Extremism, the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security, and the Center for a New American Security’s Future of U.S. Sanctions Task Force.

He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, cum laude from Harvard Law School, and was a Rotary Scholar at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain.