Stacey Plaskett

Stacey Elizabeth Plaskett (born May 13, 1966) is an American politician and attorney serving since 2015 as the non-voting delegate to the United States House of Representatives from the United States Virgin Islands' (USVI) at-large congressional district.

Plaskett has practiced law in New York City, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Plaskett was born on May 13, 1966, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in the Bushwick housing projects.

Her parents are both from Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.

Her father was a New York City Police Department officer and her mother a clerk in the court system.

Her family regularly traveled to St. Croix during her childhood, so she became familiar with island traditions and culture.

Her parents' home in New York was often home for students and other recent migrants moving to the mainland from the Virgin Islands.

She attended Brooklyn Friends School (a Quaker school) and Grace Lutheran Elementary.

She was recruited by A Better Chance, Inc. a nonprofit organization recruiting minority students to selective secondary schools.

She was a boarding student at Choate Rosemary Hall, where she was a varsity athlete and served as class president for several years.

Plaskett spent a term abroad in France during her enrollment at Choate.

She has said that Choate awakened her commitment to public service and a deep sense of responsibility to others through the biblical verse "to whom much is given; much is required".

She was one of few black students while she attended the school.

In 1988, she graduated with a degree in history and diplomacy from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Plaskett ran for student government at Georgetown under a progressive student ticket and was very active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

As a student she spoke on behalf of universities in the DC area at the General Assembly of the United Nations.

She received her J.D. degree from the American University Washington College of Law in 1994.

She attended law school at night while working full-time during the day with the lobbying arm of the American Medical Association and then with the law firm Jones Day.

In law school she studied constitutional law under her future colleague, Representative Jamie Raskin.

After graduating from law school, Plaskett accepted a position as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, New York, under Robert T. Johnson.

She prosecuted several hundred cases, including in the Narcotics Bureau.

She then worked as a consultant and legal counsel focused on internal corporate investigations and strategy for the Mitchell Madison Group.

She moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as counsel on the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, now known as the House Committee on Ethics or the Ethics Committee.

She left the Committee when she was asked by mentor and fellow trustee at Choate, Robert McCallum, to work at the United States Department of Justice as a political appointee of then-President George W. Bush.

Plaskett accepted the offer and served as counsel for the assistant attorney general for the DOJ Civil Division, and also as acting deputy assistant attorney general for the Torts Branch in the Civil Division.

She then joined the staff of Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, primarily working on the Justice Honors program and an initiative to increase the number of minority and women attorneys at the Justice Department.

She then moved to the Virgin Islands, where she worked in private practice and from 2007 to 2014 served as general counsel for the Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority, charged with the economic development of the U.S. territory.

Before 2008, Plaskett was a member of the Republican Party, and was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve in the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice.

She switched to the Democratic Party in late 2008 because she believed it was a better place to have new ideas heard.

She served as a House manager (prosecutor) during the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the first non-voting House member to do so.

Plaskett switched from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party in late 2008.

While in the Justice Civil Division, she also worked on the Terrorism Litigation Task Force, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and United States v. Philip Morris, the case against several major tobacco companies for violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) by engaging in a conspiracy to deceive the public about the health effects of smoking.

After Thompson resigned, Plaskett joined the staff of his successor, James Comey.

She later left government service to become a deputy general counsel at UnitedHealth Group.

There, she worked in the Americhoice division, handling legal work related to Medicaid and Medicare programs.

In 2012, Plaskett challenged nine-term delegate Donna Christian-Christensen in the Democratic Party primary.

Plaskett was unsuccessful, receiving 42.49% of the vote to Christian-Christensen's 57.48%.

She was initiated into Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 2019.

During a 2023 MSNBC interview, Plaskett said that Donald Trump "needs to be shot" before correcting herself and saying that he needed to be stopped.

This resulted in several conservative commentators calling for her resignation.