President Obama nominated U.S. Attorneys for Wyoming, the Eastern District of Wisconsin, the Eastern District of North Carolina and the Eastern District of Michigan today. They are:
- Christopher A. Crofts (Wyoming): Gov. David Freudenthal’s legal counsel since 2006 previously served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for 16 years. He would replace Bush holdover Kelly Rankin, who has headed the office since 2008.
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James L. Santelle (Wisconsin Law Journal).
James L. Santelle (Eastern District of Wisconsin): The Assistant U.S. Attorney has served in his current role since 1985. While working in the office he simultaneously has had stints as principal deputy director for the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, civil division chief for the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Western District of Michigan and a Justice Department attaché. He would replace Steven Biskupic who was appointed U.S. Attorney by Bush in May 2002. In 2007, Biskupic and his office came under review by congressional investigators looking into the dismissal of U.S. Attorneys. He resigned in January to join the Milwaukee law firm of Michael Best & Friedrich as a litigator.
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Thomas G. Walker (Alston & Bird)
Thomas G. Walker (Eastern District of North Carolina): The partner at Alston & Bird, LLP has been with the firm since 2003. He previously served as special counsel to North Carolina attorney general Roy A. Cooper, III, an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina and an assistant district attorney for Mecklenburg County, N.C. Walker would replace Bush holdover George E. B. Holding. Holding is overseeing federal probes of two prominent Democrats: Former Gov. Mike Easley and two-time presidential candidate, ex-Sen. John Edwards.
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Barbara L. McQuade (ICLE).
Barbara L. McQuade (Eastern District of Michigan): The Assistant U.S. Attorney has served in her role for 11 years. Simultaneously she has served as deputy chief of the national security unit since 2005. McQuade previously was an associate at Butzel Long, P.C. She would replace Stephen J. Murphy who became U.S. Attorney in 2006. In 2008 he became a federal judge in the Eastern District of Michigan.
Obama has now made a total of 34 U.S. Attorney nominations. The full Senate has considered 24 of those nominees and they were all confirmed by unanimous consent.
Ryan Reilly contributed to this report.
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Two former Illinois U.S. Attorneys today encouraged the state’s congressional delegation and public officials to house Guantanamo Bay detainees in federal and state prisons.
Thomas P. Sullivan (Jenner & Block)
Dan K. Webb (Winston & Strawn)
Ex-Northern District of Illinois U.S. Attorneys Thomas P. Sullivan and Dan K. Webb wrote in a letter that they support placing Guantanamo Bay detainees in a Thomson, Ill., state prison. The prison in Northern Illinois is being discussed as a possible facility to house some of the roughly 200 terrorism suspects still held in the Guantanamo Bay military prison, which President Barack Obama ordered closed by January 2010.
“We support trials for the detainees in our federal courts, which means that they must be brought to the U.S. to stand trial and thus must be housed in appropriate prisons in this country,” they wrote in the letter, which was also signed by former Rep. Abner Mikva (D-Ill.)
The three Illinoisans also endorsed a letter in support of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to to try 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists in a New York City federal court. Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) submitted the letter into the record at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing of the Justice Department earlier this month. The letter was signed by more than 130 people, including 25 former U.S. Attorneys.
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Forbes magazine last week released its list of the top 10 CEOs who “showed enough greed, hubris and chutzpah” to give confessed Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff “a run for his (stolen) money.”
We’ve added some information that Forbes left off its list — the top federal prosecutors who get to go after these alleged financial fraudsters, even though some of the investigations began before their time.
Preet Bharara in his first major news conference Nov. 5. The Manhattan U.S. Attorney announced the arrests of 14 people in an alleged insider trading ring around hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam. (Getty Images)
Winning a conviction in a high-profile financial case adds a notch to a U.S. Attorney’s belt. A prosecutor might even get to step out at a news conference or two, as Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara did on Nov. 5 when announcing insider trading arrests related to the Galleon hedge fund run by billionaire Raj Rajaratnam.
To be sure, not everyone on the Forbes list is accused of an actual crime. With that caveat, we present Forbes’s “Biggest CEO Outrages of 2009″ list:
1. Lloyd Blankfein. The chairman and CEO made $73 million in 2007 and $25 million in 2008, as the economy entered a deep recession. Although his salary is not a legal offense, Forbes deemed it practically criminal.
2. John Thain. The former CEO of Merrill Lynch approved $3.62 billion in bonuses for his executives last December as the company was being taken over by Bank of America and reporting a fourth-quarter loss of $15.3 billion.
3. Raj Rajaratnam. The founder of the hedge fund Galleon Group was charged with insider trading which allegedly helped him earn more than $33 million in illicit profits. He is being prosecuted in Manhattan by Bharara’s office.
4. Byrraju Ramalinga Raju. The founder of the Indian outsourcing company Satyam Computer Services in January confessed to overstating the company’s profits and fabricating its cash balance of more than $1 billion. He hasn’t been charged.
5. Thomas Petters. The former CEO and chairman of Petters Group Worldwide was charged with orchestrating a $3.5 billion pyramid scheme fraud. He is being prosecuted by the office of Minnesota U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones.
6. Edward M. Liddy. The former CEO of American International Group (AIG) faced criticism this year for high salaries and bonuses in addition to expensive retreats the company funded after receiving a considerable sum as part of the bank bailout of 2008.
7. Danny Pang. The founder of Private Equity Management Group was accused of running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded his investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. Pangdied of an apparent suicide in September at age 42. Had he lived, he would have been prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, currently headed by acting U.S. Attorney George S. Cardona.
8. R. Allen Stanford. The Texas financier allegedly sold $7 billion worth of certificates of deposit through his Stanford International Bank and misappropriated most of the money. He is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas, currently headed by interim U.S. Attorney Tim Johnson. UPDATE: Stanford also is being prosecuted by the fraud section of DOJ’s criminal division.
9. David Rubin. The head of CDR Financial Products was indicted in October on charges of conspiracy and fraud related to rigging auctions to help determine which banks would assist governments in raising money. He will be prosecuted by Bharara’s office in Manhattan.
10. Robert Moran. The CEO of Moran Yacht & Ship pleaded guilty to tax fraud to avoid indictment. He also promised to pay back taxes and penalties and cooperate with the Internal Revenue Service. He was prosecuted by the office of R. Alexander Acosta, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
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Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who’s now teaching a class at Texas Tech University, offered students some advice in an article published today in the student newspaper.
“Dream big but be patient,” Gonzales told The Daily Toreador. “You never know when the next George W. Bush is going to come along and give you a once in a lifetime opportunity like he gave me, but you have to be patient.”
Gonzales resigned in September 2007 amid an uproar over allegations that the Bush White House fired U.S. Attorneys for political reasons. He was also portrayed in several books about the Bush administration as a rubber-stamp for controversial national security policies pushed by Vice President Dick Cheney and Cheney’s powerful chief of staff, David Addington, including illegal warrantless surveillance and torture.
“We live in a great country, where the son of a cotton picker can become the attorney general of the United States. It’s a country where dreams still come true,” Gonzales told the student newspaper.
Alberto Gonzales (Getty Image
Texas Tech hired the native Texan this summer to teach a political science course and help recruit minority students. Several professors at the university have come out against his one-year, $100,000 contract. They argued Gonzales shouldn’t have been hired because of his role in Bush-era scandals. He was Attorney General from 2005 to 2007 and before that served as Bush’s White House counsel.
The ex-Attorney General told the newspaper he is open to renewing his teaching contract when it is up next year.
“I’m a component. Hopefully a helpful and useful component,” Gonzales told The Toreador. “We’ll see what happens after a year, you know, the contract may be renewed. If Tech wants me back and I think it’s best for me and my family, it’s something I would certainly consider continuing.”
Gonzales told the newspaper that the students in his junior-level political science seminar, Contemporary Issues in the Executive Branch, were a little shy at first, but they are starting to open up about politics in his class.
He told The Toreador he encourages his students to “press and push convictions and positions.”
“We’re getting into subject areas that are controversial and I have encouraged [the students] to speak out and to not hold back, to come forward and give your opinions,” Gonzales told the newspaper.
Lester Shubin (Family photo via the Washington Post).
Lester Shubin, a former Justice Department researcher who first thought to use Kevlar in bullet-resistant vests, died after a heart attack at his Fairfax County home last week at the age of 84, reports the Washington Post.
Shubin was working for the National Institute for Justice, the research and development branch of the Justice Department, in the early 1970s when DuPont came out with what he called a “funny yellow fabric” intended to replace steel belting on high-speed tires.
“We folded it over a couple of times and shot at it. The bullets didn’t go through,” Shubin was quoted as saying in a Justice Department report on the National Institute for Justice’s accomplishments.
Shubin obtained $5 million in research money from the Justice Department as his fellow researcher began developing tests. Kevlar vests have been credited with saving the lives of more than 3,000 law enforcement officers since 1975.
In his capacity as a researcher, Shubin was one of the first to recommend that dogs be used to find bombs.
“We learned that basically any dog could find explosives or drugs, even very small dogs like Chihuahuas, whose size could be an advantage,” Shubin said. “Who is going to look twice at someone in a fur coat carrying a dog? But that dog could smell a bomb as well as a German shepherd.”
Shubin was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 27, 1925 and served in the Army in France and Germany. He was among the troops that liberated the Dachau concentration camp, his son, Harry Shubin, told the Washington Post.
Read more here: Lester D. Shubin, 84; developed Kevlar bulletproof vest – washingtonpost.com.
The new U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio plans to ramp up his office’s work on white-collar, drug, gang and child exploitation prosecutions, The Columbus Dispatch reported today.
Carter Stewart (DOJ)
U.S. Attorney Carter Stewart, who was confirmed by the Senate in September, told the newspaper he is moving some of his office’s resources away from terrorism cases.
“While terrorism remains our No. 1 priority, we need more resources on our bread-and butter cases — financial crimes, public corruption, high-level drug and gang cases, and child exploitation,” Stewart told The Dispatch.
He told the newspaper that the Southern District has received the resources necessary to bring on an Assistant U.S. Attorney that will handle mortgage-fraud cases.
“This area has been hit hard by the mortgage crisis,” Carter told The Dispatch. “Some of it has been exacerbated by fraud.”
Anwar al-Awlaki
The interim U.S. Attorney for Colorado, David Gaouette, rescinded a felony arrest warrant in 2002 for the radical Islamic cleric who has emerged as a focus of investigators in the Nov. 5 shooting deaths at Fort Hood, according to ABC News.
Gaouette was an assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of terror cases in the state when the warrant for Anwar al Awlaki was rescinded, ABC said.
The day after the warrant was canceled, federal authorities detained the U.S.-born Awlaki at New York’s JFK airport as he arrived on a flight from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. After questioning, Awlaki was released and continued on his way to Washington, D.C., where he was an imam at a suburban mosque attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf Alhamzi and Hani Hanjour.
Awlaki also had met in 2000 with Alhamzi and another future 9/11 hijacker, Khalid Almihdhar, at a mosque in San Diego.
Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego, speaking anonymously, told ABC News they were “disappointed and shocked” by Gaouette’s decision not to arrest Awlaki in 2002. “This was a missed opportunity to get this guy under wraps so we could look at him under a microscope,” a JTTF source told ABC. It isn’t clear why the warrant was canceled. A spokesperson for Gaouette said he was “unfamiliar with the particulars of the Awlaki case, and would have to research it before he could comment,” ABC reported.
The cleric had first come under FBI scrutiny in 1999. The Bureau found that Awlaki had been in contact with an associate of “blind sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, whose followers were convicted of attempting to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, ABC News said. Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, runs a Web site that promotes violent jihad against the West. He was in email contact last year and this year with Maj. Nidal Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people in a shooting spree at the Fort Hood military base in Texas.
After looking into the email contacts, the FBI decided they didn’t merit further investigation. The Bureau missed information in Hasan’s training file at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington that would have shown his colleagues were troubled by views the Army psychiatrist expressed about Muslim conflict with the West. The apparent failure to connect the dots — reminiscent of pre-9/11 intelligence lapses — is the subject of congressional investigations.
Awlaki praised suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan on his blog earlier this month.
Read the full report here: How Anwar Awlaki Got Away – ABC News.
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A former UBS employee who blew the whistle on the Swiss banking giant is seeking a multi-billion dollar reward, and legal experts say odds are good he’ll collect, The New York Times reports.
Bradley Birkenfeld was sentenced to 40 months in prison for helping wealthy Americans dodge their taxes. Whistleblower advocates say the sentence was disproportionate given his assistance — he shared tax evasion secrets of UBS and its rich American clients — and worry that it could have a chilling effect on others considering coming forward.
A coalition of groups, including the National Whistleblowers Center, wrote Attorney General Eric Holder last week, asking him to push for a lesser sentence.
Regardless of the duration of his sentence, the ex-banker could exit prison a rich man.
More than 14,700 offshore tax evaders have come forward under an I.R.S. amnesty program, and the names and account details of about 4,450 UBS clients are being turned over to U.S. authorities under a settlement with the bank.
Birkenfeld’s lawyer, Stephen Kohn, said his client is entitled to a portion of the billions of dollars the federal government stands to recover. Under a 2006 law meant to encourage tax informants to come forward, whistle blowers can reap rewards of 15 to 30 percent of the taxes, fines, penalties and interest ultimately collected by the I.R.S.
Kohn, executive director of the NWC, told the Times he was seeking “at least several billion dollars.”
Erika Kelton, a partner at Phillips & Cohen, a law firm that specializes in large whistle-blower claims, said Birkenfeld has a serious claim.
“It was very credible, very useful information from inside UBS that he provided. The law is pretty clean on this,” she told the Times.
Birkenfeld pleaded guilty in June 2008 to conspiring to defraud the United States government. He admitted to, among other things, helping to smuggle diamonds in a tube of toothpaste.
Justice Department prosecutors have said they doubt whether the fraud scheme would have been uncovered without Birkenfeld’s help, but they consider him more of an informant than a formal whistle-blower because he provided few details on actual clients, according to the Times.
Birkenfeld could begin his prison term as soon as January.
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The Justice Department released a memo this week concluding the government should pay ACORN for contracts that were in place before Congress banned the community organizing group from receiving federal funds.
Legislation signed by President Barack Obama in October prohibits the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now from receiving federal funds.
Acting Assistant Attorney General David Barron, who oversees the Office of Legal Counsel, stated in an opinion dated Oct. 23 that the language of the law is ambiguous and that the government should honor contracts with Acorn that predated the law. The ban on funding for ACORN came after two conservative activists videotaped employees of the group giving advice on how to launder money and evade taxes.
The deputy general counsel for the Department of Housing and Urban Development had asked the Justice Department for its legal opinion about the pre-existing contracts it had with ACORN. The group has gotten around $53 million from the federal government since 1994, much in the form of grants from HUD, according to the New York Times.
The OLC memo states that the law “should not be read as directing or authorizing HUD to breach a pre-existing binding contractual obligation to make payments to ACORN or its affiliates, subsidiaries or allied organizations where doing so would give rise to contractual liability.”
ACORN got around $200,000 from the Department of Justice through affiliates and subcontracts between 2002 and 2009, according to a report issued last week by the department’s inspector general. Acorn also registers minority and low-income voters – who tend to vote Democratic. It has been a long-time target of conservatives.
Republicans are not reacting well to the legal opinion, writes Jake Tapper on ABC’s Political Punch blog:
The ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., blasted the DOJ opinion as “political cronyism.”
“The bipartisan intent of Congress was clear – no more federal dollars should flow to ACORN,” Issa said. “It is telling that this administration continues to look for every excuse possible to circumvent the intent of Congress. Taxpayers should not have to continue subsidizing a criminal enterprise that helped Barack Obama get elected president. The politicization of the Justice Department to pay back one of the president’s political allies is shameful and amounts to nothing more than old-fashioned cronyism.”
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When President Barack Obama signed sweeping hate crimes legislation into law at a ceremony last month, new Northern District of Ohio U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach was there – a sign of the Cleveland prosecutor’s rising influence in civil rights enforcement.
Northern District of Ohio U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach speaks at his swearing in ceremony on Oct. 26. (DOJ)
Dettelbach, who was confirmed by the Senate in September, is the new chair of the civil rights subcommittee of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys.
The AGAC advises Attorney General Eric Holder on policy and law enforcement issues. And civil rights is a top priority of the Obama administration.
At his Oct. 26 investiture ceremony, Dettelbach made clear his commitment to enforcing anti-discrimination laws by invoking Tom Perez, the new Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.
“We can and must follow Tom Perez’s example of relentless dedication to civil rights, because our citizens must understand that the laws we enforce apply equally to all, not just some,” he said in prepared remarks.
Dettelbach has a long history working on civil rights issues. He successfully prosecuted several civil rights cases during his almost two decades as a federal prosecutor at U.S. Attorney’s offices in Cleveland and Maryland and at Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
He told Main Justice in a recent interview that among his office’s “usual assortment of prosecutorial plaques and knickknacks” are two awards from former Attorney General Janet Reno that he received when he was an attorney in the DOJ Civil Rights Division.
One plaque honors Dettelbach’s work on a case that involved an Indian woman who was brought to Miami as a slave. She endured regular beatings over the course of seven months and was even branded with an iron, according to Dettelbach.
Another award commemorates the prosecution of Ku Klux Klan members who tried to undermine the integration of housing projects in Vidor, Texas.
“He is deeply committed to fighting for crime victims and to holding those who commit crimes, even the most powerful, accountable,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Mythili Raman, who worked with Dettelbach in the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office.
But Dettelbach’s experience extends beyond civil rights cases.
He was a part of the organized crime and corruption strike force during his time as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Cleveland. As deputy chief of the Greenbelt branch of the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, he prosecuted fraud cases. Dettelbach also worked as a Senate Judiciary Committee counsel to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and most recently as a partner in the Cleveland office of law firm Baker & Hostetler.
“He brings a good, well-rounded experience to the table,” said former Deputy Attorney General Craig Morford, who once supervised Dettelbach in the Cleveland U.S. Attorney’s office.
Dettelbach said while his diverse experience has prepared him to be U.S. Attorney, the job presents new challenges.
“There is no typical day,” Dettelbach said. “That’s what makes the job both so rewarding and so challenging. On any day, you are doing a mixture of managing the cases and the investigations that the assistants and agents are doing in the office, representing the office in the community and representing the office within the Department of Justice as a whole.”
The U.S. Attorney said taking over the reins of the Northern District office is “like getting on a train that going 100 miles per hour.”
“Even though I had worked here as an Assistant, it’s a much different perspective being the U.S. Attorney than it is being an Assistant,” he said.
His office is working a number of major prosecutions including a corruption scandal in Cuyahoga County and a civil rights case involving a white supremacist who mailed a noose to an Ohio chapter of the NAACP.
Dettelbach said terrorism will remain his office’s top priority, even as he puts a renewed focus on civil rights enforcement and financial fraud.
The U.S. Attorney said he is meeting with all of the office’s Assistant U.S. Attorneys to discuss his plans and hear their suggestions.
Dettelbach said his new responsibilities have cut into his personal time with his wife and two children. He works a lot and is “not allowed to talk to my wife about it,” he said.
But long hours are nothing new for Dettelbach, said Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein. Dettelbach often worked nights and weekends as the deputy chief of the Greenbelt branch office, he recalled.
“He is a guy who really enjoys working for DOJ,” Rosenstein said.
Dettelbach said his work as a federal prosecutor has “made me the happiest.”
“I have to say one of the great things about this job is you can even explain to a four- and six-year-old the importance of what we do. And that to me is a great thing that Assistant U.S. Attorneys get to do and U.S. Attorneys get to do,” Dettelbach said. “Even at the most basic level, people can understand what you’re doing is something that is important in your community.”
This post has been corrected from an earlier version.
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