The Senate confirmed three U.S. Attorneys tonight by unanimous consent, according to a Senate spokesperson.

They are:

Andre Birotte Jr. (Gov)

– Andre Birotte Jr. (Central District of California): The Los Angeles Police Commission’s inspector general succeeds Thomas P. O’Brien, who stepped down as U.S. Attorney last September. Birotte was nominated on Dec. 23. Read more about him here.

Ron Machen (Wilmer Hale)

– Richard Hartunian (Northern District of New York): The interim U.S. Attorney for the district is the first presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney to lead the office since Glenn T. Suddaby resigned in 2008. Hartunian also was tapped on Dec. 23. Read more about him here.

– Ron Machen (District of Columbia): The partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr succeeds Jeffrey A. Taylor, who stepped down as U.S. Attorney last May. Machen was nominated on Dec. 23. Read more about him here.

The Senate has now confirmed 34 U.S. Attorneys. The Senate Judiciary Committee has yet to schedule votes another 12 would-be U.S. Attorneys.

The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved three U.S. Attorney nominees during its business meeting today.

They are:

Andre Birotte Jr. (Gov)

– Andre Birotte Jr. (Central District of California): The Los Angeles Police Commission’s inspector general would succeed Thomas P. O’Brien, who stepped down as U.S. Attorney last September. Birotte was nominated on Dec. 23. Read more about him here.

Ron Machen (Wilmer Hale)

– Richard Hartunian (Northern District of New York): The interim U.S. Attorney for the district would be the first presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney to lead the office since Glenn T. Suddaby resigned in 2008. Hartunian also was tapped on Dec. 23. Read more about him here.

– Ron Machen (District of Columbia): The partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr would succeed Jeffrey A. Taylor, who stepped down as U.S. Attorney last May. Machen was nominated on Dec. 23. Read more about him here.

The panel has now approved 34 U.S. Attorney nominees, 31 of whom have already won Senate confirmation. The committee has yet to schedule votes for another 12 would-be U.S. Attorneys.

The committee also postponed — as expected — consideration of Justice Department nominees Dawn Johnsen (to head the Office of Legal Counsel), Mary L. Smith (to lead the Tax Division) and Christopher Schroeder (to head the Office of Legal Policy). Committee rules allow senators to delay a vote on a nominee for a week.

Anjali Chaturvedi (Nixon Peabody)

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton has recommended three former federal prosecutors – Anjali Chaturvedi, Michael Bromwich and Ron Machen – for U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, according to various people familiar with the process.

We previously reported here that the three lawyers interviewed with Norton, after her 17-member commission narrowed the field of U.S. Attorney applicants. Norton sent her recommendations to the White House in late August, according to one person. The process has been airtight, so bear with us.

Michael Bromwich (PBS.org)

Two people told us that Chaturvedi, a partner at Nixon Peabody LLP who specializes in government investigations and complex civil and criminal matters, made the cut. She has a combined 12 years experience as an Assistant U.S. Attorney on both the East and West coasts. She was chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California and deputy chief of the Felony Trial Section in the D.C. office.

Ron Machen (Wilmer Hale)

Another person familiar with the matter indicated that Bromwich was on the list. A former Justice Department inspector general, Bromwich now heads the internal investigations, compliance and monitoring practice group at at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. Bromwich was an AUSA in the Southern District of New York in the 1980s and later served as associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel for Iran-Contra.

And three people told us Norton recommended Machen, a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP.  Machen worked in the Fraud and Public Corruption and Homicide sections of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia from 1997 to 2001. At Wilmer, he has represented a slew of high-profile clients, including Boeing Co., CitiGroup Inc., and Mitchell Wade, the defense contractor who pleaded guilty to bribing then-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.).

Absent from the list, apparently, is Channing Phillips, a veteran prosecutor and acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. We could not confirm whether Phillips interviewed with Norton in August, but he enjoys strong support within the office.

Phillips joined the office in 1994 as a line prosecutor. In 2004, he was tapped as principal deputy assistant attorney general, the office’s No. 2. Phillips was also the office’s chief spokesman. He was named acting U.S. attorney in May, after Jeffrey Taylor stepped down for a position at Ernst & Young.

Norton’s recommendations cap the local phase of the selection process, which began in April. Phillips, Chaturvedi and Bromwich declined to comment. Machen could not be reached.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is the largest in the country, with more than 350 Assistant U.S. Attorneys and more than 350 support staff. The office prosecutes federal and local crimes.

Channing Phillips will be named interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, reports Allan Lengel at the federal law enforcement site Tickle the Wire. Click here to read his report.

Phillips, 51, is a long-time press spokesman for the U.S. Attorney office and has worked for, among other previous holders of the office, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and former U.S. Attorney Roscoe Howard. He is well respected by staff and the members of the media, Tickle the Wire reports. Bush administration official Jeffrey A. Taylor steps down today after nearly three years in the job, as interim and later court-appointed U.S. Attorney.

 U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeffrey A. Taylor will step down Friday to lead the fraud section of Ernst & Young, The Associated Press reported this afternoon. Read the news release here. 

Taylor, a former aide to Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, was appointed interim U.S. Attorney by the Justice Department in September 2006, after then-U.S. Attorney Ken Wainstein left to become Assistant Attorney General in the National Security Division. President Bush formally nominated Taylor in 2007. 

But Taylor withdrew his nomination after D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) raised objections to Taylor’s hiring of an Assisstant U.S. Attorney with a history of ethical problems, under what Norton said was pressure from Bush officials at Main Justice. Lacking Senate confirmation, Taylor has been serving under a U.S. District Court appointment.

Interestingly, Taylor was also a close friend and former roommate of a defendant in the Jack Abramoff public corruption probe, we’d heard. We haven’t seen much, if anything, written about Taylor rooming with Bob Coughlin, who was deputy chief of staff to Alice Fisher, chief of the Criminal Division. Coughlin pleaded guilty in April 2008 to one felony count of accepting gifts from Abramoff and his associates. It just goes to show how closely knit the D.C. political/legal world is.

Melissa Schwartz in the Office of Public Affairs at Main Justice said Taylor rented a room from Coughlin in 2001, but she said the relationship had no bearing on a decision to refer Coughlin’s prosecution to Maryland instead of the District, where it logically should have been. Schwartz said that decision was made because Coughlin had been a special Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C. during Wainstein’s tenure, before Taylor took over. 

Mary Jacoby can be reached at mjacoby@mainjustice.com.

Leura Canary of Alabama (gov)

In March, the Washington Post reported that several highly political Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys were seeking to stay in their posts, prompting fears on the Left that President Obama would leave a cadre of conservative prosecutors in place across the country. There’s been chatter that some prosecutors are trying to exploit the U.S. Attorneys firing scandal by arguing that if they were replaced now, the Obama administration would be politicizing the Justice Department in the same manner as the Bush White House did.

Bush Holdover Mary Beth Buchanan of Pennsylvania

This argument, of course, is ludicrous: U.S. Attorneys are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president. It’s true that these powerful law enforcement officials are supposed to administer justice without regard to partisan politics – an issue that was at heart of the U.S. Attorneys firing uproar as it became clear that prosecutors such as David Iglesias in New Mexico were being ousted for refusing to pursue cases against Democrats.

But U.S. Attorney jobs are plum political posts. When the White House changes party control, the victor gets to put his own people into these jobs. End of discussion.

Montana's Bill Mercer (gov)

So, what’s the state of play on U.S. Attorneys now that the Obama administration has passed the 100-day mark? To answer that, we tried to assemble some hard numbers. To wit: How many Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorneys were still on the job at the end of April 2001? And how many Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys are still in place now?

The answer: Around 53 Bush-appointees are still coming to work at the 93 U.S. Attorney offices around the country, by our count. But at this point eight years ago, only 32 Clinton-appointed prosecutors were still on the job, the DOJ says. That’s a difference of 21.

The above tally on Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys is our own, and it differs somewhat from the numbers reported on the Department of Justice’s Web site.  The DOJ puts asterisks next to “presidentially appointed” U.S. Attorneys. What the DOJ really appears to mean is “Senate confirmed” U.S. Attorneys. Unlike the DOJ list, we’ve included in our tally some prosecutors who were appointed during the Bush administration but never confirmed by the Senate, amid turbulence over the politicization of the Bush DOJ. Prosecutors in that category include Jeffrey A. Taylor in the District of Columbia, who withdrew his nomination under opposition from Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s non-voting delegate to the House. But Taylor has remained on the job under a U.S. District Court appointment.

We’ve also made some judgment calls, based on whether the appointees were clearly political or were simply career prosecutors filling vacancies. For example, we’re not counting Jane Duke in the Eastern District of Arkansas as a Bush holdover; she was the first deputy in the office and promoted in 2007 after interim U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin left in the wake of the U.S. Attorney firing controversy. Griffin, a former aide to Karl Rove, had been installed after the White House fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins. We also excluded U.S. Attorney Erik Peterson in Wisconsin from the tally of Bush holdovers, because he’s announced his resignation effective in June.

Given the law firm recession, there’s a plausible explanation for the Bush appointees to be sticking around. Some of them are probably having a hard time finding new jobs. And its normal to have holdovers in place as a new administration gears up; The Bush administration put out a news release in March 2001 saying it hoped to have Clinton-era U.S. Attorneys transitioned out by June 2001. When President Clinton took office for his first term in 1993, he demanded that all George H.W. Bush U.S. Attorneys hand in their resignations. But blanket resignations don’t appear to be the norm. For a complete list of U.S. Attorney vacancies and potential nominations, click here to view our interactive chart.

Nonetheless, some of the Bush-era U.S. Attorneys who haven’t resigned yet are among the most controversial politically. They include Mary Beth Buchanan in the Western District of Pennsylvania, Matt Dummermuth in the Northern District of Iowa, Leura Canary in the Middle District of Alabama, and Bill Mercer in Montana.

We asked the Obama administration to explain how it is going about the selection process for new U.S. Attorneys. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler issued this statement: 

“Over the past several months, the Department has been in close touch with U.S. Attorneys regarding the transition process. U.S. Attorneys have been informed that the administration intends to move forward on submitting new nominations in most districts, as is customary following a transition from one administration to another.

“We have not asked any U.S. Attorney to resign. Some U.S. Attorneys have left on their own accord and may continue to do that. Meanwhile, the Department has begun vetting some nominees, and in those particular districts, the U.S. Attorneys have been given ample notice that this process is underway.”

If readers have any insights or corrections to share, please email us at tips@mainjustice.com, and we’ll look into it.