Andrew E. Lelling, born in 1970 and raised in Rockland County, New York, as the youngest of three sons of dentist Irwin Lelling and Selma Lelling. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in literature and rhetoric from Binghamton University (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1991 and a Juris Doctor cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1994, where he served as Articles Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. His early career included clerking for Judge Berry Avant Edenfield on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, serving as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and working as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. From approximately 2005 to 2017, he was senior litigation counsel in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts, prosecuting white-collar crime, international drug trafficking, and other federal offenses. Appointed by President Donald Trump on December 21, 2017, Lelling served as United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts until his resignation on February 28, 2021. During his tenure, he led high-profile prosecutions, including Operation Varsity Blues (the nationwide college admissions scandal), the largest-ever MS-13 gang cases in the Boston area, eBay employees for cyberstalking (2020), the TelexFree pyramid scheme, Carlos Rafael ('Codfather') for fish fraud, INSYS Therapeutics executives (including CEO John Kapoor) for opioid bribery under RICO (the first such case), and China Initiative cases such as the conviction of Harvard professor Charles Lieber (2021) and charges against MIT professor Gang Chen (dropped in 2022). Since 2021, he has been a partner at the Jones Day law firm in Boston, where he previously served as senior counsel. He considered but declined a Republican nomination for Massachusetts governor in 2021–2022. Personally, Lelling is married to Massachusetts Juvenile Court Judge Dana Gershengorn and has two children. He is a member of the Federalist Society, a former member of the Boston Bar Journal board of editors, and a Republican. His tenure faced controversies, including the 2019 prosecution of Massachusetts trial judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph and court officer Wesley MacGregor for obstruction of justice after they sheltered an undocumented immigrant from ICE—criticized as overzealous and politically motivated, with the case dismissed in 2022 by his successor (Joseph admitted conduct but was not convicted)—and criticism of the China Initiative for racial profiling of Chinese-American academics, which Lelling defended by citing China's demographics; later in private practice, he suggested recalibrating academic enforcement.