President Bush has decided to nominate Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge from New York who has presided over several high-profile terrorism trials, as his next attorney general, and is expected to announce the selection Monday, according to several people familiar with the decision.
Should the Senate confirm him, Mukasey (pronounced mew-KAY-see) would become the third attorney general to serve under Bush. As the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, he would preside over a Justice Department that has been roiled by congressional inquiries into the firing of federal prosecutors and the resignation of the previous attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.
Unlike Gonzales, Mukasey is not a confidant of the president. Nor is he a Washington insider. But people in both political parties say he possesses the two qualities that Bush has been looking for in a nominee: a law-and-order sensibility that dovetails with the president’s agenda for the war on terror, and the potential to avoid a bruising confirmation battle with Democrats who control the Senate.
One of those Democrats, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, who led the fight to oust Gonzales, issued a statement Sunday evening praising Mukasey.
“While he is certainly conservative, Judge Mukasey seems to be the kind of nominee who would put rule of law first and show independence from the White House, our most important criteria,” Schumer said. “For sure we’d want to ascertain his approach on such important and sensitive issues as wiretapping and the appointment of U.S. attorneys, but he’s a lot better than some of the other names mentioned and he has the potential to become a consensus nominee.”
White House officials on Sunday refused to discuss the selection. But Mukasey spent Sunday afternoon at the White House, meeting with senior advisers to Bush, and by Sunday evening it seemed to be an open secret in Washington that Mukasey would be the nominee.
“He’s not as well-known to everybody within the Beltway as some people; he hasn’t been in and out of the Bush administration or the prior Bush administration, but he’s a rock-solid lawyer and a first-rate judge,” said Jay Lefkowitz, a former domestic policy adviser to Bush who practices law in New York.
Mukasey, 66, was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and retired last year to go into private practice. He spent 19 years as a federal judge in New York, including as chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan. Before that, he was a prosecutor in Manhattan when Rudolph Giuliani was the U.S. attorney there. He and his son, Marc, are advisers to the Giuliani presidential campaign.
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An important sign that Mukasey would pass muster with conservatives came Saturday night, when William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, endorsed Mukasey.
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Michael Mukasey
Age: 66
Hometown: New York City
Experience: After Ronald Reagan appointed him in 1987 to the Manhattan federal court, Mukasey had a hand in several high-profile terrorism cases. He sentenced Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman to life in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and appointed a lawyer to represent “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla.
Federal protection: Mukasey’s experience with terrorism suspects led to years of around-the-clock U.S. marshal protection. About a dozen deputies filed a grievance in 2005 complaining that he, a similarly protected judge and their spouses abused their position by expecting their bodyguards “to carry groceries, luggage and golf clubs.”
— Associated Press