For almost six months, Loretta Lynch was known mostly as the woman who couldn’t get an up-or-down vote on her nomination as attorney general.

But after only a month in office she could hardly have crafted a more attention-grabbing debut than the dramatic announcement she made Wednesday of an American-led takedown of corruption in FIFA, the governing body of international soccer.


Lynch, wrote the German newspaper Bild, was “shocking FIFA like an earthquake.”

In seven years as chief prosecutor in Brooklyn, Lynch oversaw a slew of financial investigations that targeted some of the world’s biggest banks and won admissions of rigging multi-billion-dollar markets in mortgages and global currency.

But none of those cases managed to punch through the noise like the U.S. legal assault on FIFA and the arrests of seven of its officials Wednesday morning at a Zurich hotel.

“It’s important that Attorney General Lynch and [FBI Director] Jim Comey got up and announced these indictments in a press conference that will be seen all over the world,” said Mark Corallo, a former aide to John Ashcroft, who served as attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. “People care about sports. … It’s a huge story, and it is a heck of a lot more interesting than the average tax case — and this one is a tax case. This is one where she hits a home run. It helps to define who she is and helps to define her to the American people.”

Lynch didn’t have a chance to do that during the long interim between her nomination early last November and her confirmation on April 27, when she waited in silence for the political clouds to clear. During that time, Senate Republicans refused to hold a vote on her nomination to protest President Barack Obama’s immigration order.

But on Wednesday, Lynch filled TV screens across much of the world — appearing not just on news channels, but on the far more popular sports networks, which rarely spend time discussing federal indictments.

Former White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said the FIFA-related charges Lynch announced are certain to resonate in a way few Washington stories do.

“By no means am I trying to suggest that these sorts of implications would play a role in the decision-making around such things, but generally speaking, more Americans will consume this information than almost anything else the government will do this month,” Pfeiffer said. “Between ESPN and the Internet, this will be widely known.”

Speaking in front of a phalanx of investigators and prosecutors in Brooklyn, Lynch was unflinching in her condemnation of the FIFA officials who took part in the scheme.

“They were expected to uphold the rules that keep soccer honest and to protect the integrity of the game. Instead, they corrupted the business of worldwide soccer to serve their interests and to enrich themselves. This Department of Justice is determined to end these practices, to root out corruption and to bring wrongdoers to justice,” the attorney general declared.

Lynch said the bribe-taking was no aberration but a pattern that began back in 1991 and never let up.

“They did this over and over, year after year, tournament after tournament,” she said. “These individuals through these organizations engaged in bribery to decide who would televise games, where the games would be held and who would run the organization overseeing organized soccer worldwide — one of the most popular sports around the globe.”

Top officials often swoop in on cases they know little about and claim credit, but the facts of the soccer probe defied that kind of analysis.

The case was built in Lynch’s Brooklyn office over a period of years, with some of the most intense activity taking place during her most recent tenure as U.S. attorney from 2010 to 2015.

Lynch’s intimate knowledge of the investigation was clear during Wednesday’s news conference. She confidently fielded questions about the complicated international situation, including the potential impact the indictment could have on upcoming election of FIFA’s next president.

“We basically resolve cases when the evidence comes together, when they are ready for resolution. Unfortunately, FIFA has had issues around elections for years in the past,” Lynch said, insisting that the charges were not intended to affect that process. “We were not able to taken that into consideration with the timing of our arrests.”

Early reviews from Europe of Lynch’s performance were effusive.

“The pantheon of world soccer has a new hero,” Tunku Varadarajan wrote on POLITICO Europe. “To the names of Pele, Maradona, Cruyff and Messi, add another: Loretta Lynch. The US attorney general … is destined to go down as the most consequential woman in the history of the game. She has burst into the Augean stables of FIFA with a team of industrial cleaners, determined to rid the governing body of international soccer of its legendary filth.”

Longtime crusaders against corruption in global sports said it was hard to overstate the level of media attention Lynch and the U.S. moves were receiving in many countries.

“Whatever touches on FIFA and whatever is linked to corruption, it is a big story,” said Sylvia Schenk, a former Olympic athlete who now works for the group Transparency International. “In Germany and in many European countries, they are welcoming the fact that the U.S. authorities have decided to put a stop to it.”

However, Schenck said how the U.S. action will play outside much of Europe was less clear. State-run media in many countries could be expected to play down the action and some citizens in countries where corruption is rampant may regard a sports-related prosecution as trivial.

“When you have a corrupt environment … when that’s daily life, what happens at FIFA, that’s just a small part of the problem,” she said.

The U.S. could also face a backlash as a result of the actions Lynch announced Wednesday. Many are interpreting the indictment as a challenge to the selection process that led to the award of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. However, that process is the subject of a separate, ongoing probe by Swiss authorities, Lynch said.

Indeed, Russia reacted angrily to the U.S. legal action, blasting it as “another case” of the U.S. trying to impose its legal standards and rules on other countries.

While the White House brushed aside questions about the soccer scandal, Obama himself did play a role in the unsuccessful effort to bring the World Cup to the U.S. for the tournaments ultimately awarded to Russia and Qatar.

“As a child, I played soccer on a dirt road in Jakarta, and the game brought the children of my neighborhood together,” Obama wrote in a letter to FIFA President Sepp Blatter, who was not charged Wednesday but has faced repeated calls to resign. “Soccer is truly the world’s sport, and the World Cup promotes camaraderie and friendly competition across the globe.”

Some observers said that a new U.S. bid for the 2026 World Cup could face opposition as a result of Lynch’s moves, but that may be a price Americans have to pay in order to try to clean up the game.

Corallo said that whatever downside there may be abroad to Lynch’s soccer crusade, she’s likely to get broad support from Americans and from U.S. lawmakers on the issue.

“If you look at the geopolitics of this thing, it definitely is a little bit of a quagmire,” he said. “But it will accrue to her benefit and I guarantee on her next trip to Capitol Hill someone will congratulate her on this case — and it might even be a Republican.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated Schenk’s Olympic record.

Hans Von Der Burchard contributed to this story.