Mandana (Mandy) Fatemi is a senior associate in the firm’s Investigations and Criminal Litigation group. Her practice focuses on internal and government-facing investigations and complex litigation, drawing on her experience advising senior Executive Branch officials and conducting high-stakes vetting of government officials.

Before rejoining WilmerHale in 2025, Ms. Fatemi served in the White House under President Joseph Biden, holding a series of roles, including Senior Deputy Associate Counsel and Ethics Counsel, where she led the vetting investigations of Presidential nominees for Senate-confirmed positions and senior White House appointments. In these roles, Ms. Fatemi leveraged her skills in developing facts necessary for identifying potential legal, ethical, and reputational risks through examining private and public sources, analyzing financial disclosures, and conducting candidate interviews. She also collaborated with the Office of Government Ethics and other agency ethics counsel to resolve complex ethics issues and regularly briefed senior White House leadership—including the White House Counsel, legislative affairs, and personnel teams—on candidate suitability, conflict-of-interest concerns, and exposure to media, congressional, or public scrutiny. Ms. Fatemi’s strategic counseling and her comprehensive investigations helped drive informed executive decisions, enabling decisionmakers to meaningfully weigh risk exposure in advance of nomination announcements. 

Earlier in her career, Ms. Fatemi served in the White House under President Barack Obama, where she was the Director of Student Correspondence and Engagement.  In that role, Ms. Fatemi acted as an intermediary between youth and President Obama by routing correspondence for agency assistance, producing written material that was distributed to constituents across the nation, coordinating opportunities for direct dialogue between the White House and young letter writers through digital outreach and special events, and helping facilitate the daily delivery of ten constituent letters to the President. 

Ms. Fatemi first joined WilmerHale as a summer associate in 2018 and rejoined as an associate in the firm’s Washington DC office in 2019. Ms. Fatemi earned her JD while interning for the Honorable Gerald Bruce Lee of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in Manhattan, where she focused on sex equality in education and the workplace.