Trump's Lithuanian ambassador nominee: What we know about Keith Noreika

Nomination and Experience

Keith Noreika is a Harvard Law School graduate. During Trump's first administration, he served for six months in 2017 as the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a US Treasury bureau overseeing banking supervision with around 4,000 employees. If confirmed, he would be the first non-career diplomat to hold the position of US ambassador to Lithuania. Trump has also appointed non-career diplomats as ambassadors to Latvia and Estonia.

Personal Background and Family History

Public records indicate Noreika was born and raised in Pennsylvania, where Lithuanian emigrants began settling in significant numbers in the late 19th century. In an interview with IFLR, Noreika referenced his Lithuanian heritage. In 2017, at the invitation of Lithuania's Finance Ministry, he attended a fintech conference in Vilnius. He told IFLR: "I am going there as a private citizen to share my observations on the interaction between financial technology and banking, and I am happy to do so given my Lithuanian heritage." During that visit, he also lectured at Vilnius University's Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. His father, Alexander J. Noreika, who died in 2014, had an obituary noting that donations could be made to St. Casimir’s Church in Philadelphia, a Lithuanian church and one of the oldest diaspora parishes in the Diocese of Scranton. The obituary also stated that his father attended St. Casimir’s School, the first Lithuanian school in Philadelphia, and later earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Drexel University.

Deeper Roots

According to the genealogy website Geni, which operates on a Wikipedia-style model, Noreika's paternal grandfather was Alexander C. Noreika, born in Philadelphia in 1908. His great-grandparents were Anthony (Antanas) Noreika and Apolonia Noreika (Apolonija Noreikienė), whose birthplace is listed as the Kaunas Governorate, then part of the Russian Empire. A naturalization document from 1933 on Ancestry confirms that Antanas was born in Kaunas in 1875 and married Apolonija in 1902. That same year, the couple arrived in the US by ship. The document lists two children: Anthony and Alexander. Alexander was the grandfather of Keith Noreika. This article was prepared with contributions from Stephen Nauyokas, a curator at Geni and one of the founders of the Lithuanian Heritage Project.