Chris Fonzone

Non-Resident Senior Fellow

Chris Fonzone is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law.  Fonzone served as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice from 2023 to 2025.  OLC, by delegation from the Attorney General, provides written opinions and other legal advice to the President and all executive branch agencies on a wide range of issues, with a focus on matters of particular complexity or importance, including sensitive national security matters.

Fonzone previously held a number of other government roles.  From 2021 to 2023, he was the General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  During the Obama Administration, Fonzone was Deputy Assistant and Deputy Counsel to President Obama and the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council (NSC).  And earlier in his career, Fonzone was Senior Counsel to General Counsel of the Department of Defense and served in career roles at the Department of Justice, both at OLC and on the Civil Division’s Appellate Staff. Fonzone also served as a Member on the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board from 2017 to 2019.

Outside of government, Chris is currently a Member of Anthropic’s National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council, where he supports the identification and development of AI applications that strengthen U.S. capabilities in key areas and assists in the development of industry-leading standards to promote a “race to the top” for responsible national security AI solutions.  He was also the lead national security counsel to the Biden-Harris Transition, and a partner in Sidley Austin’s Privacy and Cybersecurity group, with a practice that focused on a wide range of issues related to information technology and cybersecurity. 

Fonzone has lectured and taught classes on national security law at a variety of law schools, and his writing on national security and other legal topics has been published in a variety of forums, including the Washington Post, Newsweek, Lawfare, and Just Security.