A Justice Department lawyer in D.C. under investigation for criminal contempt in connection with the botched Sen. Ted Stevens prosecution was more than just a federal prosecutor, according the man’s obituary, which ran in The Washington Post Wednesday.
Nicholas A. Marsh, 37, was “an avid reader, cook and loved music and just resumed playing his soprano saxophone,” his obituary said. He lived in the Takoma neighborhood of Northwest Washington D.C. with his wife, a congressional staffer, and enjoyed baseball and college basketball.
Nicholas Marsh (Getty)
Marsh was born in Elizabethtown, Ky., and later graduated from St. Xavier High School in Louisville, Ky., in 1991.
He graduated magna cum laude from Williams College in 1995 with bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and history. At Williams, Marsh played lacrosse and won the college’s Gaius C. Bolin 1889 Prize for an essay he wrote. He also took a philosophy course at Oxford University for a year and played lacrosse there.
Marsh received his law degree and a master’s degree in literature from Duke University in 1998.
After law school, Marsh clerked for Appeals Judge Andrew Kleinfeld of the 9th Circuit in Fairbanks, Alaska. Marsh then worked at the law firms of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and Hale and Dorr in New York (now part of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr LLP).
He joined the DOJ in 2003, where he spent most of his time in the Public Integrity Section.
In 2004, Marsh prosecuted a case in Mississippi involving individuals who submitted false documents to a settlement fund for the patients harmed by the drug “fen-phen.” The next year, he won a guilty verdict against a former national Republican Party official from New Hampshire for conspiring to jam Democratic get-out-the-vote phone lines during the 2002 elections.
In 2006, Marsh helped prosecute a number of public corruption cases involving current and former state government officials in Alaska. After winning convictions against several Republican legislators including State Rep. Vic Kohring and former legislators Bruce Weyrauch and Pete Kott, Marsh helped prosecute the corruption case in Washington D.C. against the former Republican senator from Alaska.
A jury found Stevens guilty of lying on his Senate disclosure forms, but U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan later vacated the conviction after an internal DOJ probe discovered potentially exculpatory evidence that wasn’t handed over to the defense.
Marsh was then transferred to the DOJ Office of International Affairs last year. He was part of the unsuccessful effort to extradite film director Roman Polanski from Switzerland to California to stand trial on sex charges from decades ago.
His friends told Talking Points Memo that Marsh felt like the DOJ unfairly sidelined him over the Stevens case.
He committed suicide by hanging himself, according to Beverley Fields of the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. He was found unconscious in the basement of his D.C. home at about 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, according to a police report.
Marsh is survived by his wife, parents and several relatives. He also had a “faithful canine companion” named Bourbon, the obituary said.
