George W. Croner, Esq.
George W. Croner retired from active practice in 2016, after 28 years as a shareholder and director of Kohn Swift. Over the course of his legal career, Mr. Croner represented clients at all stages of civil litigation from pretrial matters, through trial, and on appeal. He acted as class counsel in a number of class action lawsuits that produced sizeable recoveries, and also represented both plaintiffs and defendants in securities and other complex litigation.
Mr. Croner represented clients in litigation and appeared in federal and state courts throughout the United States, including Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Delaware, Florida, Colorado, California, Maryland, and Washington, DC.
While remaining of counsel to Kohn Swift, Mr. Croner currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank located in Philadelphia. He also serves as a member of the Advisory Council at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at Penn Law School.
Mr. Croner focuses on electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes and, more particularly, on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). He has written nearly 40 separate articles since 2017 that have been published on multiple media platforms.
Before coming to Kohn Swift, Mr. Croner was a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the U.S. Navy from 1980-1988, including service as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. While serving in the Navy, Mr. Croner was awarded two Defense Meritorious Service Medals, a Meritorious Service Medal, and a Navy Commendation Medal for his performance as an attorney.
In his last Navy assignment, as an attorney with the Office of General Counsel at the National Security Agency (NSA), he was NSA’s litigation counsel on several major espionage trials and served as the NSA representative to the White House Interagency Group for the Iran-Contra Affair. He received a letter of commendation from President Ronald Reagan for his work in connection with Iran-Contra matters.
Mr. Croner served in the Navy for 17 years. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with distinction, was selected for the Navy’s Law Education Program in 1977, and graduated, cum laude, from Penn Law School in 1980. He then attended the Naval Justice School (Lawyer’s Course) in Newport, Rhode Island, where he graduated first in his class in 1980, and received the ABA Award for Professional Merit (highest standing in class) and the Frederick Shields Award (highest standing among all lawyers completing the course of study in 1980).