Capitol Hill staffer Kenyen Brown was nominated Thursday to be U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. Read the White House news release here. 

Kenyen Brown (Main Justice file photo)

According to Sean Reilly at the Mobile Press-Register, Brown would be the first African-American to hold a top federal prosecuting position in Alabama. 

Main Justice broke the story of the surprise choice for the Mobile-based district two months ago. Brown, a former AUSA in the district, has worked on Capitol Hill as a staffer on the Senate and House ethics committees since 2000. He didn’t lobby for the job and wasn’t one of the two candidates formally recommended to the White House by Rep. Artur Davis, the senior Alabama Democrat in the House.

Artur Davis (gov)

News that Brown was vetted for the job raised eyebrows in Alabama’s gossipy legal community, in part because one of his former mentors is a close friend of arch-conservative Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Read our June 6 report here. 

Since then, we learned more about the events that led to Brown’s unexpected selection. And we can confidently lay to rest the rumor that Sessions secretly had a hand in engineering Brown’s selection.

What rumor? Well, we originally didn’t report it because we couldn’t find any evidence for it. But we can’t debunk something you haven’t heard, so here goes:

When Brown was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District in the 1990s, he was befriended by a veteran prosecutor named Richard Moore, according to people in Alabama who know both men. Moore had been hired by Sessions, who served as U.S. Attorney for the district from 1981 to 1993. Sessions later sponsored Moore for the Inspector General post at the Tennessee Valley Authority and publicly praised him as a “good friend” during his 2003 Senate confirmation hearing. Read our previous report about Moore and Sessions here. 

The rumor in Alabama was that Sessions put Brown’s name forward with some kind of wink and nod that he’d hire Moore, his old mentor, as his deputy — and thus allow Sessions to wield influence indirectly over his old turf.

But this just didn’t check out.

First, Sessions told Main Justice’s Andrew Ramonas in June that while he knows Brown, he didn’t recommend him for the job. Then, a Democratic official with knowledge of the selection process said Brown emerged as a consensus candidate because Rep. Artur Davis’s first choice for the job, Southern District of Alabama Assistant U.S. Attorney Vicki Davis (no relation), didn’t fare well in her Washington interview. For a description of some of the hurdles Vicki Davis appeared to face, click here for our previous report and scroll down.

It turns out that Rep. Davis met Brown last year, after he saw Brown’s name in the congressional newspaper Roll Call’s annual feature on the 50 most powerful staffers in Congress. Reading that Brown was from Alabama, the congressman asked to meet Brown — as any good politician would do.

Later, Vicki Davis ran into trouble. But Rep. Davis’s announced second choice for the Mobile job, former U.S. magistrate judge Patrick Sims, was never seriously considered, because White House wanted at least one African-American heading up one of the three prosecuting districts in a Deep South state with a history of racial conflict. Vicki Davis is African-American. Sims is white.

The nominee for Alabama’s Northern District, Joyce Vance, is also white. And so is the intended nominee for Alabama’s Middle District, Joe Van Heest, who’s been held up because of objections from Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). Read our previous report about Van Heest’s delay here. 

Davis then recommended the White House consider Brown. And the rest is, as they say, history.