A prosecutor in Boston is facing a three-judge panel today to determine whether he should be disciplined for allegedly withholding exculpatory evidence in an incident that led to another federal judge releasing accused mobsters from prison, The National Law Journal reports.

In 2007, District of Massachusetts Chief Judge Mark Wolf sent a complaint letter to the Massachusetts Bar Counsel about Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Auerhahn. In the letter Wolf detailed missteps by Auerhahn in prosecuting alleged mobsters Vincent Ferrara and Pasquale Barone. A government witness recanted some statements about the defendants’ involvement in a murder, which Auerhahn did not disclose, Wolf said in the letter.

Auerhahn’s alleged misconduct conduct occurred between 1991 and 1993 but was not disclosed to the court until August 2002. A year later, then-U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan asked Wolf to hold off on referring the matter to the bar counsel’s office until the Justice Department’s internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility, had completed its investigation.

In January 2005 OPR issued a 112-page report concluding that Auerhahn had acted in “reckless disregard of discovery obligations” and “exercised poor judgment,” although the ethics office found no evidence of intentional misconduct. Sullivan issued a written reprimand to Auerhahn.

In January 2008, Wolf sent a letter to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey criticizing the Justice Department’s handling of Auerhahn. Wolf followed up with another letter to Attorney General Eric Holder in April 2009 asking for further review of the matter.

In the meantime, the bar counsel complaint was handed off the federal court case to Judge Joseph Tauro of the District of Massachusetts. Tauro selected district court judges George O’Toole Jr., William Young and Rya Zobel to sit on the three-judge review panel.

Former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on Tuesday during a radio interview with The Washington Times joked that Rep. James Moran (D-Va.) “ought to get professional help, perhaps from Maj. Nidal [Hasan],” the accused Fort Hood shooter, The Huffington Post reports.

Last week, Moran criticized opponents of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his Sept. 11, 2001, co-defendants in the Southern District of New York, Talking Points Memo reported. “They see this as an opportunity to demagogue,” Moran told TPM. “They will seize on any opportunity to do that, and that means they’ll even take a stand that’s un-American.” He added, “It’s un-American to hold anyone indefinitely without trial. It’s against our principles as a nation.”

During his interview, Mukasay was asked to respond to Moran’s comments. “I think he’s lost touch with reality. He ought to get professional help, perhaps from Maj. Nidal.” Last week, Mukasey slammedthe decision to try Mohammed in New York City.

Former U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on Sunday called last week’s shooting at Fort Hood “the worst terrorist act carried out on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.”

Mukasey made his remarks in a little noticed speech to military families at a Veterans Day ceremony in central Pennsylvania. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is suspected of opening fire at the Texas military base last Thursday in an attack that killed 13 and wounded 30.

Former Attorney General Mukasey (doj)

The former Attorney General criticized the New York Times and government officials for appearing to rule out the possibility that Hasan’s shooting spree was directed or inspired by any terrorist group. Mukasey told the military families that al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has sought to create a “leaderless jihad” that promotes solo attacks, according to The Patriot-News newspaper.

“In that respect, there certainly are very close links to terrorism,” Mukasey said in the Sunday speech. “In that respect, this is, in fact, the worst terrorist act carried out on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.”

Mukasey, who is now a partner at the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm in New York, wasn’t available for comment on Monday.

Hasan was vocal about his opposition as a Muslim to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and had once worshiped at a Northern Virginia mosque with ties to radical Islam. But The New York Times on Nov. 7 published an article with the headline, “Little Evidence of Terror Plot in Base Killings.”

Instead, the Times and other news organizations have focused on the psychological strains associated with military service, depicting Hasan, an Army psychiatrist about to be deployed to Afghanistan, as having snapped under pressure. Today, however, The Associated Press and The Washington Post reported that federal authorities are looking into Hasan’s ties to an al-Qaeda linked imam.

Anwar al-Aulaqi, a former preacher at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., praised Hasan on his personal blog today as a “hero” for opening fire on U.S. service members. Hasan worshiped at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in 2001, when Aulaqi was its spiritual leader. Aulaqi, who now lives in Yemen, also counseled two of the Sept. 11, 2001 attackers in the months before they hijacked airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Federal authorities have said they suspect Aulaqi has been involved in plotting al-Qaeda attacks.

Mukasey, a former federal judge, presided over the 1995 trial of the “blind sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, who led a precursor organization to al-Qaeda in Brooklyn in the 1990s. Rahman was tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and later convicted of a plot to blow up New York City landmarks.

On Sunday he told the military families that Hasan didn’t need to have formal ties to a foreign terrorist organization to have carried out a terrorist attack. ”To tell us to believe that someone has to have a membership card in al-Qaida or any other organization in order for them to act as a terrorist, and in order for us to call what he does an act of terrorism, is to tell us to refuse to look facts in the face, and to refuse to believe what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears,” Mukasey said, according to The Patriot-News.