Lynne Jeffries Hunt, Scripps Class of 1975, and one of the highest ranking women in the FBI as legal attaché in the agency’s London headquarters, will give the commencement address on Sunday, May 15, at 3 p.m., on Elm Tree Lawn on the Scripps College campus.
Hunt oversees 12 managers from London headquarters, located in the U.S. Embassy. The office is the FBI’s largest overseas and covers the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Jersey Islands. Its primary focus is on counterterrorism, in close association with local law enforcement agencies.
A California native with a law degree from the University of San Diego in addition to her Scripps degree, Hunt joined the FBI in 1978 as the 91st woman hired. Her first assignment was with the organized crime division, in Chicago. After marriage to her husband, Jack, who worked with her on the same squad, the pair was transferred to FBI headquarters, and Hunt joined the legal counsel division. There, Hunt supervised white-collar crime investigations and later played an instrumental role in building the FBI’s health care and insurance fraud investigations.
Hunt served as chief of the Health Care Fraud Unit in the mid-1990s. She and her unit assisted the Department of Justice and Congress in drafting the 1996 Kennedy-Kassenbaum Bill, which helped pave the way for more stringent laws on Medicare/Medicaid fraud and dedicated more dollars to fighting health-care crimes.
Partly in response to 9/11, Hunt was appointed assistant director of the FBI’s Inspection Division, in September 2002. In this job, she was responsible for the internal inspection process of all FBI field offices. She received the Presidential Management Rank Award for excellence in executive management for 2002. She and her husband, now a retired FBI agent-turned-special intelligence consultant, have two daughters of college age; they moved to London when Hunt accepted her current position, in 2003.
Hunt oversees 12 managers from London headquarters, located in the U.S. Embassy. The office is the FBI’s largest overseas and covers the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Jersey Islands. Its primary focus is on counterterrorism, in close association with local law enforcement agencies.