The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission's enforcement division is set to be led by a former federal prosecutor who tackled financial fraud and insider trading cases in the Southern District of New York before turning to private practice, most recently as a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig LLP.

A CFTC spokesperson confirmed to Law360 that David I. Miller will join the agency as director of enforcement under Chairman Michael Selig.

"David's decades of experience and proven track record as a commodities and derivatives litigator will play a critical role in ensuring the Division is focused on its core purpose of policing fraud, abuse, and manipulation," Selig said in a statement.

Miller joins the CFTC as the agency's authority potentially expands to cover digital assets and adjusts to the explosion of prediction markets.

He spent over five years as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York before turning to white collar and enforcement defenses as a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP in 2014 and later joining Greenberg Traurig as a litigation shareholder in 2019.

Earlier in his career, Miller served as a special assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and provided litigation counsel to the CIA before pursuing terrorists as a U.S. Department of Justice trial attorney in 2007. He served as the CIA's assigned representative in the prosecution of former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

In 2009, Miller moved to the Southern District of New York under then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, where he turned to prosecuting financial crimes as a member of the securities and commodities fraud task force, among other roles. Miller handled a multitude of insider trading actions in New York, including as a member of the team that handled "Operation Perfect Hedge," which led to over 80 convictions related to insider trading offenses.

On the defense side, Miller recently beat back a watershed crypto insider trading case against former OpenSea employee Nathaniel Chastain, whom a jury initially convicted on charges tied to NFTs he bought knowing they would later be featured on his employer's NFT marketplace homepage.

Miller had argued the activity wasn't insider trading because Chastain's conduct didn't involve securities or commodities trading and that the information he used to trade didn't provide any commercial value to his employer to sustain a fraud conviction.

Though a jury convicted Chastain in May 2023, Miller and appellate counsel from Shapiro Arato Bach LLP won a reversal at the Second Circuit in July, when the appeals court found the Manhattan federal court was wrong to instruct the jury that the government didn't need to prove the featured NFT information was valuable to the company. Federal prosecutors formally dropped their case on Tuesday after they told the lower court in January that they wouldn't pursue a retrial.

Miller also defended ex-Coinbase employee Ishan Wahi in the government's first-ever crypto insider tipping case. Wahi received two years in prison after admitting to tipping his brother and a friend to cryptocurrency listings that enabled them to make $1.5 million of illegal profit.

Miller will take the helm at the CFTC's enforcement division as it faces a potential expansion of its authority over digital assets. Congress is contemplating throwing much of crypto oversight to the CFTC in its pending bill to regulate crypto markets, the Clarity Act.

While the bill has stalled in the Senate, CFTC chair Selig has committed to using the agency's existing authority and collaborating with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to create a crypto regulatory framework.

Miller's insider trading experience may also be a boon to the agency as it faces a new set of challenges to police prediction markets, which present novel opportunities to leverage insider information trading on the outcome of real-world events. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York has already said he foresees criminal prosecutions addressing prediction market trading.

The CFTC's Selig has made clear he believes his agency is the primary regulator for event contract trading, with plans to write rules and battle state gambling regulators in enforcements where the CFTC's jurisdiction is at issue.