Debra Evans Smith was named special agent in charge of the Administrative Division at the FBI’s Washington Field Office Monday.
Smith, a 26-year veteran of the bureau, was most recently a special assistant to FBI Director Robert Mueller. She has served in the New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington field offices. She has worked on several Russian foreign counterintelligence investigations, including the case of former FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen.
The full release is after the jump. – LN
Stephen A. Miller, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York and Philadelphia, is joining Cozen O’Connor, the firm said in a statement.
Miller spent six years as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and the past three years in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, where he was deputy chief of the Violent Crime, Counter-Terrorism, and Immigration Fraud Unit.
Miller will work in the firm’s white collar and complex criminal litigation practice.
The full release is after the jump. – LN
Nicholas A. Marsh, one of the Justice Department lawyers being investigated for criminal contempt in connection with the botched Sen. Ted Stevens prosecution, has committed suicide, his lawyer confirmed Monday.
“Sadly, it is true. We understand that Nick took his own life,” the lawyer, Robert Luskin, said in a brief email to Main Justice today.
The Stevens prosecution team. Nicholas Marsh, dark blue suit, back left. (Getty)
Marsh was 37 years old and lived in Washington, D.C. He was married, but had no children, according to Luskin.
A special investigator appointed by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan was examining whether prosecutors pressured an FBI agent to change notes of an interview with a key witness for the government, Main Justice reported in May.
The special investigator, Washington lawyer Henry Schuelke III, was said to be focusing on two Alaska-based Assistant U.S. Attorneys in that particular matter, James Goeke and Joseph Bottini.
Marsh was a Public Integrity Section prosecutor who worked on the case against Stevens, an Alaska Republican who lost re-election in 2008 after being convicted at trial on corruption charges. Stevens died in August in a plane crash in Alaska.
Sullivan dismissed the charges against Stevens last year and vacated his convictions after an internal DOJ probe discovered potentially exculpatory evidence hadn’t been given to the defense.
Last year, Marsh was transferred from Public Integrity to the DOJ’s Office of International Affairs, where he worked on the attempt to extradite film director Roman Polanski from Switzerland to California to stand trial on decades-old sex charges.
Marsh joined the Public Integrity Section in 2004, according to the Blog of Legal Times. Before his tenure at the DOJ, Marsh worked in New York for Hale and Dorr LLP (now part of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP).
UPDATED – 12:21 p.m.
“It’s a terrible tragedy,” Luskin said in a brief phone interview from Paris. “It’s particularly sad because I am sure that, at the end of the day, he would have been completely exonerated.”
UPDATED – 12:45 p.m.
In a statement, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer expressed condolences to Marsh’s family.
“Our deepest sympathies go out to Nick’s family and friends on this sad day,” Breuer said. “The Department of Justice is a community, and today our community is mourning the loss of this dedicated young attorney.”
Additional reporting by David Johnston.
Attorney General Eric Holder was close to being ousted last year, former White House Counsel Greg Craig indicated in private remarks that were inadvertently caught on an open microphone.
“The great thing about it, if Rahm goes to run for mayor, is that Eric survived,” Craig said before a Sept. 21 talk at Columbia Law School, according to an audio recording obtained by the National Law Journal. Later, during a public portion of the talk, Craig said of Holder: “They were after him.”
Rahm, of course is White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is reported to be considering running for mayor in his hometown of Chicago.
A hard-nosed political veteran who served in the U.S. House and the Clinton White House, Emanuel clashed with Craig and Holder repeatedly on national security issues.
Emanuel eventually pushed Craig out of his White House job, angry about his handling of issues from the botched plan to close the military facility at Guantanamo Bay to his support for release of graphic Bush-era legal memos justifying harsh interrogation techniques against terrorism suspects.
Craig and Holder were allies in those battles, arguing for the legal and constitutional principles behind their policy decisions. Emanuel reportedly thought the decisions were bad politics.
Holder also lost favor after announcing last November that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be tried in federal court in New York City. The plan generated a bipartisan outcry, and the White House overruled it. Mohammed’s fate remains in limbo.
And let’s not forget the thoughtful speech on race relations that Holder gave in February 2009. Unfortunately for the Attorney General, only one incendiary sound bite got picked up from it – that the U.S. is a “nation of cowards” when it comes to speaking frankly about race.
President Barack Obama chided Holder for the remark, though the two remain personal friends and continue to socialize.
Craig, meanwhile, declined to comment to the NLJ on the exchange. “I don’t remember that conversation, and even if it occurred, it was off the record,” he said.
