A year into his role as Georgia’s most prominent federal law enforcement official, U.S. Attorney Theodore Hertzberg says he’s using every tool at his disposal, including some his predecessors ignored, to fulfill an aggressive crime-fighting philosophy.
Atlanta-based Hertzberg, whose jurisdiction encompasses 46 counties and around 7.5 million people across North Georgia, has broken new ground recently by bringing federal charges against the suspects of two violent attacks on MARTA trains and a fiery protest over the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. He said it’s believed to be the first time anyone in his role, and possibly statewide, has brought those charges, some of which are rarely used though they are decades old.
In an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hertzberg explained how he’s improving partnerships with state and local law enforcement as part of an effort to prosecute more people and reverse his office’s annual decline in the number of people being sentenced. And he revealed the bold target he set for his first fiscal year: to charge at least one federal case originating from each of the 46 counties in his district.
“I am pushing my prosecutors to operate with a sense of urgency and a sense of ownership and the knowledge that we have more tools in the toolbox than have been used previously,” he told the AJC. “I don’t want anybody to be like, ‘Yeah, that’s not something we would ordinarily touch.’ The past is the past. If we can, then we probably should.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia is the largest of three of its kind in the state and one of the largest in the Southeast. It prosecutes federal crimes, defends civil cases in which the United States is a party and collects certain debts owed to the federal government.
Hertzberg, a federal prosecutor in Georgia since 2015, was elevated to lead the office in an interim capacity in May 2025 and was appointed to the position several months later by a judicial vote.
He said he’s on track to complete his “Every County Initiative” by the end of fiscal 2026 on Sept. 30, roughly doubling the number of counties the prosecutions from his office typically touch in a given year.
A crime-fighting philosophy that extends beyond politics
President Donald Trump and senior Department of Justice officials have encouraged U.S. attorneys to “lean in” and play a bigger role in addressing violent crime, Hertzberg said, adding that aligns with his aggressive approach to charging.
For example, “someone pretty high up” in the department recently directed all U.S. attorneys to federally prosecute any amount of fentanyl trafficking in their districts, no matter how small, Hertzberg said. He said previously, the marching orders for federal prosecutors typically involved prioritizing the biggest cases, often international in scope and touching multiple states.
Hertzberg said although his efforts fit Trump’s directives, they are not especially political or partisan. He said he doesn’t want to be a prosecutor of last resort.
“I think it’s philosophical,” he said. “It’s about attitude toward criminal prosecution and what our role ought to be as a federal prosecuting authority. Are we sitting back and waiting for referrals from our law enforcement partners? Are we deferring to the state to handle what could otherwise be done and only getting involved when we absolutely have to?”
Hertzberg said he’s not worried about the fact that a Cobb County judge just dismissed the Georgia attorney general’s latest case against Atlanta Public Safety Training Center protesters for being a political stunt. He said he has every confidence in his own case against the protesters, who are accused of launching explosives at the Cobb County office of the facility’s general contractor in 2022.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
The federal statute that Hertzberg’s protest case relies on has been on the books for some time, though it’s more often used to prosecute hate crimes, he said. Similarly, the federal law used against those accused of shooting and stabbing MARTA passengers in the past month “goes back to the beginning of the criminal code” and was last amended about 20 years ago, he said.
“These aren’t necessarily new authorities that we’ve been given, this is just new use of existing authority and applying it to areas that require federal intervention at this particular point in time,” he said. “It’s not overreach.”
Hertzberg said he believes a combination of factors are behind why those laws were not used by his predecessors, including their relative obscurity. He said he learned of the federal statute criminalizing attacks on railroads and mass transportation only last fall, when it was used in a landmark prosecution of a man accused of fatally stabbing a young Ukranian woman on the Charlotte light rail system in North Carolina in August.
The law, under which sentences include the death penalty, could have been used locally in 2024 to federally charge the suspect accused of leading officers on a high-speed chase in a hijacked Gwinnett County transit bus and killing someone onboard, Hertzberg said.
“People weren’t aware of the authority because it hadn’t been done. Nobody knew that it could be done,” he said. “Nationwide, that statute has been used to address violent acts on mass transit in only a handful of instances, and most of them have been within the past year.”
Ryan Buchanan, who stepped down as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District the day before Trump was sworn into office last January, declined to comment.
William Keyes and Margaret Heap, the U.S. attorneys in Georgia’s Middle and Southern districts, respectively, declined interviews for this article. A spokesperson for Heap said she is “laser focused on our priorities of combating violent crime, prosecuting illegal immigration and pursuing fraud against taxpayer funds” in full support of DOJ initiatives and policies to uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights.
Reversing a sentencing decline with law enforcement partners
Data compiled and published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows the number of people sentenced in the Northern District fell from a peak of 609 in fiscal 2022 to 477 in fiscal 2024, the lowest number in more than a decade.
Hertzberg said he’s working to improve on the increase in sentencings his office handled in fiscal 2025, when 502 people were sentenced. He said it was announced at a U.S. attorneys conference in January that his office was the fifth most productive in the country based on internal caseload data, behind larger offices in Florida, New Jersey and other states.
Part of the plan involves bettering relationships with local and state law enforcement in every corner of the district, he said.
“I don’t know that that’s always been a priority for the person sitting in my chair,” he said. “It absolutely requires a conscious effort. There are counties that I think we have no relationships with at all and haven’t for years.”
Hertzberg said he has monthly meetings with district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs and other law enforcement leaders in the district, in part so they can alert him to cases he might be interested in pursuing.
He said there are sometimes offenders who can be taken off the streets with federal charges for which there is no state equivalent, such as the possession of ammunition by a prohibited person. A federal case can also bring harsher consequences for offenders who may otherwise not be deterred by state prosecutions, Hertzberg said.
“I want to know about every opportunity there is to prosecute a federal crime,” he said. “We’re going to vet everything that we can, so that we can give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, based on the information and based on our resources.”
Hertzberg said some of his recent cases, including those over the MARTA attacks, demonstrate how his office can respond to what’s happening in the community. Last week, he brought charges against a man accused of flying a drone in restricted airspace over Centennial Olympic Park during the FIFA Fan Festival in Atlanta.
The U.S. attorney said he has an opportunity and an obligation to show that federal law enforcement is involved in community safety and holding wrongdoers accountable.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
“We weren’t going to sit back and say that’s not really our job, there’s somebody else who could do it first,” he said. “We’re participating as full partners because it’s our community, too.”
Hertzberg has his work cut out for him, not least because 53 employees left his office in fiscal 2025 amid a nationwide exodus from the DOJ tied to Trump’s second term. He said he’s hired around 30 people, representing about a third of his office’s current attorneys, and is continuing to look for talent.
He said the DOJ let him recruit during a hiring freeze, and the “One Big Beautiful Bill” included funding to add almost a dozen positions to his office. Still, there are currently more people in the office’s training division than there are dedicated to prosecuting drug, gang or white-collar offenses, he said.
“A lot of experience walked out the door and the folks that I’m hiring can’t replace somebody who had 30 years on the job,” he said. “We are doing more with less.”
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