John M. Dowd is an American lawyer who is now a partner in the Washington, D.C office of the law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld LLP. He currently heads the criminal litigation group of the firm, with his expertise primarily on complex civil and criminal cases. John Dowd has defended and prosecuted several noteworthy criminal issues for over 30 years, propelling him into the list of Who’s Who in America and recognized in The Best Lawyers of America for more than 10 years.

John Dowd received his Juris Degree from Emory University in 1965 and he has been noted to represent public officials involved in major legal problems. Perhaps the most celebrated case that John Dowd handled was his representation of 2008 U.S. Presidential candidate John McCain in the hearings held in 1990 and 1991 during the Keating 5, a Senate Ethics Investigation that accused five United States Senators of corruption in 1989. The Keating 5 involved four Democratic senators and one Republican senator, with John McCain being the sole Republican. The senators allegedly accepted contributions from Charles Keating Jr., a real estate and savings and loan owner who played a role in the Savings and Loan crisis in the United States during the late 80s and early 90s; and further alleging that these politicians intervened in 1987, on behalf of Keating, thereby causing the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to recoil from taking action against Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The investigation ended in 1991 and McCain received the mildest of punishments than the other senators charged. In a recent interview with John Dowd, the hard-hitting lawyer commented that McCain’s involvement in the case was a political smear job.

Another notable case that featured John Dowd was when Major League Baseball Commissioner Bartlett Giamatti hired him to investigate on baseball legendary player Pete Rose. The investigation led to Rose’s lifetime ban from the sport in 1989.

John Dowd authored the 225-paged Dowd Report which described the suspected wrongdoings of Rose in betting on baseball. Other prominent cases that Dowd has handled include his representation of Monica Goodling in her 5th Amendment challenge for being involved in planning the controversial dismissal of 9 U.S. attorneys in 2006; and former Arizona Governor Fife Symington III, who was convicted of bank and wire frauds in 1997 and later pardoned.