Lisa Monaco: The Global Plumber Plugging the World’s Legal Leaks with Dollar Diplomacy
Lisa Monaco: Washington’s Fixer-in-Chief Finds the Whole World Is Now the Client
WASHINGTON—In the marble mausoleum that passes for the U.S. Department of Justice, Lisa Monaco is the closest thing to a universal adapter plug. Slide her into any geopolitical socket—cyber-intrusion in Bucharest, ransomware in Rio, or a coup-curious colonel in Conakry—and somehow the lights still flicker on. Officially she is Deputy Attorney General, a title that sounds as thrilling as “Assistant Comptroller of Paper Clips.” Unofficially, she is the Biden administration’s global crisis whisperer, the person dispatched when the rule of law starts listing like a Greek ferry in high season.
Monaco’s portfolio is what Pentagon types call “inter-agency,” a euphemism for “everyone blames everyone else.” European prosecutors ring her up when Russian malware turns their hospitals into expensive paperweights; Pacific island nations ping her when Chinese fishing militias start ramming coast-guard cutters. She answers on a secure line that probably costs more per minute than a Tokyo studio apartment, speaking in the calm, slightly disappointed tone of a headmistress who has caught you smoking behind the gym—again.
The joke, of course, is that the United States spent the last two decades exporting democracy like cheap cologne, only to discover the bottle leaks. Monaco’s job is to convince foreign partners that the same legal system that produced both Brown v. Board and the McRib is still worth emulating. She does this by promising things Washington sometimes delivers—extradition, evidence-sharing, the occasional frozen oligarch yacht—and quietly ignoring the parts that make allies wince, like warrantless surveillance or the fact that half the Senate thinks the Hague is a quaint theme park.
Take the recent ransomware takedown of a South African port. Monaco’s team coordinated with Interpol, Estonia’s cyber-guardians, and a plucky 19-year-old in Lagos who noticed the malware dialing home to a server in—wait for it—Florida. Within 72 hours the U.S. had unsealed indictments, seized cryptocurrency wallets, and issued press releases in four languages, including the legally-binding dialect of Twitter outrage. The port reopened, ships disgorged their containers of knock-off Crocs, and Monaco flew home in time to brief a president who keeps asking why Wi-Fi can’t simply be unplugged during emergencies.
Her admirers—mostly harried EU officials who subsist on espresso and Schadenfreude—call her “the translator,” the rare American who can explain U.S. grand-jury rules without sounding like she’s reading IKEA instructions upside-down. Skeptics note that Monaco’s brand of legal multilateralism is essentially crisis-plumbing: tighten a sanction here, unclog an MLAT there, and hope the whole edifice doesn’t backflow into the Potomac. Still, in an era when strongmen quote the Federalist Papers like karaoke lyrics, having a plumber beats another arsonist.
The darker punch line is that Monaco’s authority rests on the dollar’s reserve-currency status and the FBI’s habit of kicking in doors on five continents before breakfast. Without those, she’d be just another earnest lawyer in sensible shoes. But leverage ages like milk in the tropics, and every time Washington weaponizes the financial system—freezing Afghan reserves, say, or confiscating Russian castles in the Alps—another bloc of countries starts whispering about SWIFT alternatives and yuan-denominated oil contracts. Monaco’s task is to keep the plumbing functional long enough for someone, somewhere, to invent a better septic tank.
Meanwhile, the world keeps obliging with fresh emergencies. In the past month alone she’s juggled a crypto-exchange collapse in the Bahamas, election tampering in Tbilisi, and a would-be assassin in Chisinau whose Google search history included “How loud is a suppressor underwater?” (Answer: still loud enough for the FBI tip line.) Each episode ends with Monaco at a podium promising “robust cooperation,” a phrase that sounds reassuring until you remember that “robust” is also how Starbucks describes its burnt coffee.
And yet, the cynics notwithstanding, the lights do stay on—dimly, sporadically, but on. Which, in the current global climate, counts as a form of magic. Lisa Monaco will never trend on TikTok; her greatest talent is making catastrophic threats appear merely chronic. In a world addicted to drama, that may be the most subversive act of all. If civilization is, as some wit claimed, the lengthening of the food chain until it snaps, Monaco’s job is to splice in an extra link or two. We’ll see how long the chain holds. Until then, she keeps her passport current and her charger handy—because the next socket is already sparking.
