Jen Daskal is a Partner at Venable LLP. She is a national security legal and policy expert, with years of experience managing crisis, mitigating risk, and working at the intersection of technology, policy and law. From October 2023 to January 2025, Daskal served as the Deputy Homeland Security Advisor at the White House. Before that, she was the Principal Deputy Legal Advisor at the National Security Council and served as Acting General Counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, where she oversaw over 3,000 attorneys, including the Department’s cybersecurity, intelligence, litigation, and law enforcement legal teams.

Before joining the federal government, Daskal was a tenured law professor at American University Washington College of Law (WCL) until February 2021. In 2020, she founded and served as the first Faculty Director of WCL’s Tech, Law & Security Program. As a law professor, she wrote extensively on issues of data security and data privacy, testified multiple times before Congress, and won several awards for her work.

Daskal also served as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice from 2009-2011. She previously worked as senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and law clerk for the Honorable Jed S. Rakoff. From 2011-2013, Daskal was a national security law fellow and adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center.

Daskal is a graduate of Brown, Cambridge University (UK), where she was a Marshall Scholar, and Harvard Law School.

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