Prior to joining Goodwin, Mr. Kistner served in the Obama administration as Confidential Assistant to the Department of Homeland Security’s General Counsel and as Special Assistant to the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). At the Department Homeland Security, he helped to draft internal reports and reports to Congress on export control and other national security issues, wrote and edited the Director’s briefing materials, and served as a liaison between the Director and various ICE components. Before his service in the administration, Mr. Kistner was a staffer on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Mr. Kistner has also served as Special Assistant District Attorney in the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he appeared in court on a daily basis. In that capacity, he prosecuted hundreds of cases, including ten trials and numerous motions to suppress and motions to dismiss, on charges such as Assault & Battery, Operating Under the Influence, Check Fraud, Larceny, and Drug Distribution.
Mr. Kistner is a partner with the Truman National Security Project and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Environmental Voter Project. He has written numerous op-eds on Homeland Security policy that have been published in the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and elsewhere. He is also the author of Federalist Tycoon: The Life and Times of Israel Thorndike (University Press of America, 2015).
While in law school, Mr. Kistner was a summer law clerk at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, working in the Anti-Terrorism and National Security Unit, and was a staff member of the Boston University International Law Journal.