Jo Ann Harris

United States Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Jo Ann Harris. Jo Ann Harris (née Murray; May 18, 1933 – October 30, 2014) was a federal prosecutor and the first woman to head the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice. Among other accomplishments during her tenure, she created a special task force to investigate abortion clinic bombings, and was involved in the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Early life Harris was born in Macomb, Illinois and grew up in Galesburg, where she attended public schools.

She majored in Journalism at the University of Iowa and graduated in 1955. Her best-known prosecution was that of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church, for tax evasion in 1982.

Her first role in the Department of Justice's Criminal Division in Washington D.C. was from 1979–81 as Chief of the Fraud Section where she approved and supervised the first successful prosecution under the newly enacted Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In that role, she supervised investigations and prosecutions being handled by over 400 government lawyers and established the Department's first Computer Crime section and a task force to investigate violence against abortion clinics. The 100-page report found no evidence of prosecutorial misconduct but concluded that the lead attorney "exercised poor judgment and made mistakes in his analysis, planning and execution of the approach to Lewinsky."