Goldman Sachs has hired Robert Sobelman — a hotshot federal prosecutor who worked on the corruption case against outgoing mayor Eric Adams that was controversially scrapped by the Trump administration — as its new head of investigations, The Post has learned.
Sources close to Sobelman, an alum of Colgate University and Brooklyn Law School, said he is to join the David Solomon-led lender “imminently.”
“Robert is leaving and going to run investigations at Goldman,” said one senior source briefed on the matter. “It is part of a recent exodus in the Southern District of New York.”
Sobelman was not immediately available for comment. A Goldman Sachs spokesperson declined to comment.
The 39-year-old US attorney is currently the chief of the public corruption unit at the Southern District of New York in Manhattan. He’s the latest in a string of high-profile exits from 26 Federal Plaza after the Trump administration ordered that the case against Adams be dropped.
Those included former interim Manhattan US attorney Danielle Sassoon, a conservative Trump appointee who in February had refused to comply with Trump’s order to drop the Adams case.
At least 10 other federal prosecutors in Manhattan left this spring following the fracas.
Jay Clayton, who had served as the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term in the White House, became the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York in August after serving on an interim basis since April. He replaced Damian Williams, a Joe Biden appointee.
Sobelman’s victories in the US Southern District included helping to jail disgraced New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez for bribery. In 2022, he led the case against Michael Avenatti, the former lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels, who was jailed for attempting to extort Nike for $25 million.
Avenatti, who was jailed on an initial 14-year sentence that was later reduced to eight, was also accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed that she had sex with President Trump.
Sobelman also helped prosecute the case against Steve Bannon, Trump’s one-time chief strategist, over fraud allegations that overshadowed an online crowdfunding campaign known as “We Build the Wall”.
Bannon eventually pleaded guilty in February to one count of scheme to defraud, a low-level felony, and avoided jail time.
Sobelman’s close friend David Kusnetz recently told Colgate University’s magazine that Sobelman’s “successful prosecutions of powerful political figures are a testament to how he always approached challenges at Colgate — with integrity and grit.”
