Michael Edney is a partner in the Washington DC office of Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP and its white collar criminal defense practice. He defends executives and corporations from federal Government overreach, including criminal prosecutions and agency enforcement actions. He has taken on the alphabet soup of Washington's regulatory agencies-from the Justice Department to the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to the Federal Trade Commission to the Food and Drug Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency.

In addition to his criminal defense practice, Mike regularly brings actions challenging government agency regulations as illegal and unconstitutional before they are enforced. He has sued government agencies and reversed their attempted regulations seeking to upend the energy, financial and tobacco industries, among others. Many of the regulations Mike has convinced the courts to reverse would have arbitrarily ended hundreds of businesses, absent the courts' intervention.

His civil litigation practice spans beyond anti-regulatory suits. He has brought some of the leading First Amendment cases in the country. On behalf of The Washington Free Beacon, he vindicated the publication's First Amendment right to access the sealed court records before the Arizona Supreme Court. He has defended corporations in bet-the-company litigation concerning securities, environmental, employment and fair housing. He has represented States at the request of their Governors. He has repeatedly served as counsel for former Attorneys General of the United States when they appear as amici curiae before the Supreme Court.

Mike also represents clients on numerous national security matters, including the Classified Information Procedures Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, matters before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, government cyber-security investigations into companies regarded as critical national infrastructure, the handling of classified information by government contractors, and pre-publication review of books authored by former government officials for sensitive and classified information.

His private practice draws from a half-decade of prior Government service. During the administration of President George W. Bush, he served as deputy legal advisor to the National Security Council at the White House and in the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice, where he helped the Administration address many legal issues pertaining to the Nation's war on terror.

Mike graduated with high honors from The University of Chicago Law School, where he was Articles Editor of The University of Chicago Law Review and was enrolled in The Order of the Coif. Immediately after law school, Mike served as a law clerk to the Honorable Danny J. Boggs on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Mike grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.

Bar Admissions

Education
JD, University of Chicago Law School, high honors, 2001

BA, University of Notre Dame, magna cum laude, 1998