Former Utah U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman has weighed in on the side of the federal government in the emotional debate over immigration reform, the Deseret News reported.

Former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman (Ray Quinney & Nebeker)

On Wednesday Tolman, a Republican who served as the state’s top federal prosecutor from July 2006 to December 2009, joined Hispanic community leaders to tout a proposed resolution by state Sen. Ross Romero (D) that calls on Congress to address immigration reform. The proposal and recommends state-issued worker permits and guest worker programs be delayed until January 2013 at the earliest.

With a nod toward the controversy in Arizona, where the state has ordered local police to take on the immigration enforcement powers of the federal government, Tolman and Romero hailed the resolution as the only “rational and constitutional” step forward in the increasingly contentious Utah debate.

“I worry about the state taking up different legislation to send messages to Washington, D.C., without really sending the message: This is a federal issue. Get it solved,” Tolman said. ”The more you have states enacting legislation, the more you get what happened in Arizona.”

He continued: “The debate, whether it’s accurate or not, becomes the color of their skin versus the constitutional rights they may have,” adding, “That’s a dangerous precedent to be setting in every single state that’s battling this issue.”

Tolman said the varying state immigration bills nationwide are creating “massive confusion,” the newspaper reported.

A federal judge has ruled that Attorney General Eric Holder violated government policy guidelines three times when he publicly commented on a Portland, Ore., terrorism case, The Oregonian reported.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud (Multnomah County Jail)

Somali-born U.S. citizen Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested last year on charges he attempted to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland. Mohamud was arrested after undercover FBI agents provided him with bomb materials, authorities said.

At a news conference after Mohamud’s arrest, Holder said the suspect had declined “a number of opportunities” to back out of the alleged bomb plot and added that he was confident that “no entrapment claim will be found to be successful.” The FBI has come under fire for its tactics in the case and others involving Muslims. Holder recently defended the undercover tactics, saying in a speech: “Those who characterize the FBI’s activities in this case as ‘entrapment’ simply do not have their facts straight – or do not have a full understanding of the law.”

Attorneys for Mohamud asked a court to bar Holder from speaking about the case. They filed a motion in federal court accusing Holder of prejudicing the pool of potential jurors. Holder has strongly denied suggestions that Mohamud was a victim of government entrapment. Attorneys say Holder’s statements violate constraints placed on pretrial public comments by prosecutors under federal rules and the rules of due-process.

In a statement in December, the Justice Department said Holder’s “comments have been appropriate and entirely consistent with [DOJ's] filings in court.”

U.S. District Judge Garr M. King of Portland on Wednesday in his ruling wrote, “I do not believe that the Attorney General made the comments to influence the outcome of the trial.” He added, “In this high-profile case, however, there are statements which I conclude constitute a breach of the policy.” King also wrote that Holder’s public comments violated DOJ guidelines by venturing an opinion about Mohamud’s guilt. But he declined a defense motion to require Holder to stay silent on the case.

Two prosecutors have been promoted to leadership positions in the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, where they are supervising a new Criminal Division unit dedicated to complex national and international financial cases.

Seetha Ramachandran (Facebook)

Seetha Ramachandran, who was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York; and Jonathan E. Lopez, a former Fraud Section prosecutor who most recently worked in the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs, last month became co-Deputy Chiefs of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, known as AFMLS. Ramachandran and Lopez also will oversee the section’s new Money Laundering and Bank Integrity Unit.

Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer of the Criminal Division announced the creation of the unit in October.

Ramachandran had served in the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney’s Office since 2005. She worked on money laundering and fraud cases, including investigations into alleged multi-million dollar schemes committed against the National Bank of Ethiopia and a customer of a JP Morgan Chase & Co. lockbox facility. Ramachandran also has taught legal writing at Fordham University.

She was a litigation associate at the law firm of Richards, Spears, Kibbe & Orbe LLP from 2003 to 2005 and at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP from 2000 to 2003. Ramachandran also was a law clerk for Judge Richard J. Cardamone of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1999 to 2000.

Ramachandran received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1996 and her law degree from Columbia University in 1999.

Lopez had served in the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs for the last year, working on various policy matters, including honest services fraud and sentencing guidelines. He previously was a Senior Litigation Counsel in the Criminal Division Fraud Section from 2006 to 2010, handling Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and fraud cases, including some of the Enron Corp. prosecutions.

He was Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida from 2003 to 2006, working on child exploitation, identity theft, drug and gun cases. Lopez was also a corporate associated at the law firm of Sidley & Austin LLP from 2000 to 2003.

Lopez received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997 and his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 2000. He was a member of the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review.

Four Swiss bankers have been indicted on charges that they were part of a decades-long conspiracy to help thousands of rich Americans hide billions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice and the IRS said Wednesday.

The four, Marco Parenti Adami, Emanuel Agustino, Michele Bergantino and Roger Schaerer, work for an international bank headquartered in Zurich and having offices in cities around the world, including New York City and Miami, the authorities said. The found were indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia and charged with conspiring with other Swiss bankers to defraud the United States, the DOJ and the IRS.

The authorities said the four worked with “high net worth individuals” to help them evade taxes through “illegal cross-border banking,” secret accounts and travel to the Bahamas and Switzerland.

As of 2008, the authorities said, the international bank maintained “thousands of secret accounts for customers in the United States with as much as $3 billion in total assets under management in those accounts.”

Although the indictment did not name the bank, The New York Times reported that people familiar with the case had identified it as Credit Suisse. The Times reported that investigators in Germany had raided the offices and homes of four Credit Suisse employees in an operation that a prosecutor called part of a “very, very extensive investigation.”

“The conspiracy dates back to 1953 and involved two generations of U.S. tax evaders including U.S. customers who inherited secret accounts at the international bank,” according to a statement by Neil H. McBride, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; John A. DiCicco, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Tax Division, and Douglas Shulman, Commissioner of the IRS.

The announcement is tantalizing for what it doesn’t say, especially who the “high net worth individuals” are and whether charges against them are imminent. While the authorities did not say so, the abundance of detail in the announcement suggests that investigators may have obtained the cooperation of some people who hope to minimize their punishment. As for the four who have been indicted, the authorities said they face up to five years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 if they are convicted.

Former New Jersey Assistant U.S. Attorney Carolyn Murray was sworn in on Tuesday as acting Essex County prosecutor, the Newark Star-Ledger reported.

Carolyn Murray (Essex County Prosecutor's Office)

Murray worked in the state’s U.S. Attorney’s office from 1995 to 2003 under Chris Christie, first as an Assistant U.S. Attorney before being promoted to chief of the Public Prosecution Unit.

Her other public sector work includes a lengthy tenure with the Essex prosecutor’s office as an assistant prosecutor and first assistant prosecutor. Most recently, she served as counsel to state attorney general Paula T. Dow. Dow, who also worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney under Christie before taking her current job, was the Essex County prosecutor.

Murray also has worked in private practice at Tompkins, McGuire, Wachenfeld & Barry, LLP in Newark in 1987.

New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman attended Tuesday’s ceremony.

President Barack Obama announced his intention on Wednesday to nominate Justice Department official Carl Shapiro for the Council of Economic Advisors.

Carl Shapiro (University of California at Berkeley)

Since 2009, Shapiro has served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics in the Antitrust Division at DOJ. He previously held the position during the Clinton administration from 1995 to1996.

Before joining DOJ, he consulted for various private clients as well as DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission, mostly in the area of antitrust economics.

He currently is on leave from the University of California at Berkeley, where he is the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy at the Haas School of Business and Professor of Economics in the Economics Department.

Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday that the Justice Department, in a significant policy change, will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 statute that limits the definition of “marriage” for federal purposes as a union between a man and a woman.

President Barack Obama and the DOJ have longed walked a tightrope regarding the law, which Obama as a candidate said he found abhorrent but which the Obama administration’s DOJ said it felt obligated to defend against court challenges (See earlier coverage by Main Justice).

“The Department has a longstanding practiced of defending the constitutionality of duly-enacted statutes if reasonable arguments can be made in their defense,” Holder explained in his statement about the change in policy.

“Much of the legal landscape has changed in the 15 years since Congress passed DOMA,” Holder said. “The Supreme Court has ruled that laws criminalizing homosexual conduct are unconstitutional. Congress has repealed the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. Several lower courts have ruled DOMA itself unconstitutional.”

Holder noted that the law has recently been challenged in the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which covers New York, Connecticut and Vermont. He said two lawsuits in the circuit were important in the policy shift.

“In these cases, the Administration faces for the first time the question of whether laws regarding sexual orientation are subject to the more permissive standard of review or whether a more rigorous standard, under which laws targeting minority groups with a history of discrimination are viewed with suspicion by the courts, should apply,” Holder said.

“After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the President has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny.”

Holder also sent a letter to congressional leaders explaining the shift.

The Attorney General said the DOJ was not becoming just a sideline observer but would “continue to represent the interests of the United States throughout the litigation.”  He said, too, that the DOJ “will also work closely with the courts to ensure that Congress has a full and fair opportunity to participate in pending litigation.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and a prominent Muslim advocacy group that has a rocky history with the FBI filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department agency alleging the bureau improperly targeted Muslims for surveillance, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says paid FBI informant Craig Monteilh infringed on the constitutional rights of several hundred Muslims several years ago when the FBI allegedly ordered him to engage “indiscriminate surveillance” of Muslims. Monteilh has said he was told to keep an eye on members of an Irvine, Calif., mosque in an effort to find potential terrorists.

“The FBI should be spending its time and resources investigating actual threats, not spying on every American who happens to worship at a mosque,” Peter Bibring, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, told The Post.

Law enforcement officials have said Monteilh served as a paid FBI informant for a number of years until 2007, according to The Post. But they have said he was working on an existing probe and wasn’t ordered to spy on Muslims because of their religion.

The FBI declined to comment to The Post on the lawsuit filed by the ACLU and CAIR.

The bureau has had a tense relationship with CAIR and the greater Muslim American community over the last decade.

In 2008, the FBI cut off contact with the leaders of the prominent Muslim advocacy organization because a terrorism trial in Dallas showed they were part of a support network for Hamas, which the U.S. classifies as a terrorist group for its history of suicide bombings against Israel. But the DOJ has since worked to improve its relationship with the Muslim American community.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez of the DOJ Civil Rights Division have said the DOJ is committed to protecting the rights of Muslim Americans while aggressively working to combat terrorism. In his remarks before the Muslim Public Affairs Council in 2009, Perez said racial profiling is “not just bad as a matter of civil rights; it is ineffective police work.”

While Chris Christie continues to throw his weight around New Jersey, there’s less of it to throw these days, the Associated Press reported.

Although the New Jersey governor and former U.S. Attorney won’t say how many pounds he’s lost, the AP reported that his suits have become “noticeably baggy.” The weight loss sparked speculation he’s serious about running for president in 2012.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. (Creative Commons)

Christie told the AP, “I’m not going to put any numbers on it because you just set yourself up for failure.”

He said that he works out with a trainer three mornings a week and has been eating better. “What I’ve done over the last 10 months is I’ve just watched what I eat, work out, and slowly but surely I’m taking the weight off,” he told the AP.

Christie’s weight became an issue during his successful 2009 gubernatorial campaign. Then-Gov. Jon Corzine (D) took several shots at Christie’s weight.

In an interview, Corzine — when asked if he thought Christie was fat —  touched his hairless head, smiled and said, “Am I bald?”

Corzine also ran an ad, which he was criticized for, in which a voice-over said: “Christie threw his weight around as U.S. Attorney and got off easy,” referring to allegations that Christie used his authority as U.S. Attorney to avoid problems related to his driving record.

Christie charmed his way out of the situation by challenging Corzine to “man up and say I’m fat.”

The governor, whose weight has fluctuated since he stopped playing organized sports in high school, told the AP that his motivation to slim down is his four kids. The pugnacious governor, who is known for taking on teachers unions and other special interests, also conceded in another interview he doesn’t particularly feel the need to be nice.

“I’m not one of those politicians who thinks that because I’m in public office I’ve got to be nice all the time. If you’re not nice to me, I don’t gotta be nice to you,” Politico reported, quoting an interview Christie gave to Fox News.