lily
09-18-2007, 03:24 PM
I don't understand what the Republicans don't like about him. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/17/AR2007091702504.html?wpisrc=newsletter)
A Conservative Record, But Not in Lock Step
By Amy Goldstein and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 18, 2007; Page A01
The first spring after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the chief judge of the
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York spoke out in favor
of the assertive but highly controversial legal strategies the Bush
administration was using to detain hundreds of Middle Eastern men as
terrorism suspects.
The government was entirely justified in arresting such suspects on
immigrations violations and holding "a very small number of people" for a
considerable period on material-witness warrants, the judge, Michael B.
Mukasey, told graduating students in the Brooklyn Law School class of 2002.
Civil libertarians who criticized the detention campaign as an unprecedented
or unauthorized use of federal powers were spreading "breathless half-truths
and outright falsehoods," he said.
Mukasey's willingness to defend aggressive legal anti-terrorism measures
before a tough audience helps to explain his appeal to President Bush, who
nominated him yesterday as the next attorney general. Mukasey, 66, is a
former Reagan-era federal prosecutor and private lawyer who served as a
federal judge in New York's Manhattan for nearly two decades. Not a
nationally prominent figure, he is best known in legal circles for presiding
over two of the most high-profile terrorism cases that have come before the
courts in recent years: the trial of the "blind sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman for
plotting to blow up New York landmarks and the detention of Jose Padilla.
Those cases make him one of the few judges in the country who have as much
real-world experience in legal issues surrounding counterterrorism efforts.
Mukasey's views on national security law and executive power also reflect a
steady, if not absolute, conservatism that dates to his days as a quiet
outlier on a liberal campus as a Yale law student in the 1960s. It is a
conservatism that can be seen in some of his most significant rulings and
other writings over the past few years.
Mukasey is an Orthodox Jew who was raised in New York's Bronx, the only son
in a family led by a father who ran coin laundries. He has taken a path
through the Ivy League, worked at a law firm that represented such colorful
clients as Roy Cohn and Claus von Bulow, and been appointed by President
Ronald Reagan to one of the country's busiest federal courts. Since his days
as a young prosecutor, he has been a close friend and political supporter of
former mayor and current Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W.
Giuliani.
Despite his successes, Mukasey has not displayed a driving ambition or
political nature, according to lawyers, legal scholars, former law clerks,
classmates and others who have known him over the years. He wields a
razor-like sense of humor and can be stubborn about his ideas. "He's not an
ideologue for the sake of being an ideologue," said Andrew Ruffino, a former
law clerk of the nominee's. Said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor who
was a classmate of Mukasey's: "He is not a hyper-charged Federalist Society
type. He is not a glad-hand networker."
Mukasey's record from the bench of about 1,500 published opinions consists
mainly of non-ideological matters: dirty cops, entertainment-industry
rivalries and immigrant-smugglers.
Mukasey grew up in an apartment building in the Bronx and was 12 years
younger than his only sibling, a sister. He spent his college summers
working for a lumber company, a beer distributor and United Press
International.
Mukasey attended the Ramaz School, an Orthodox Jewish day school, and he
remains heavily involved in that community. His wife, Susan, was the
headmistress of the lower school. They are both members of Kehilat Jeshurun,
an Orthodox synagogue with a politically conservative congregation on
Manhattan's Upper East Side that is connected to the school. Another member
of the congregation is Mukasey's friend Jay Lefkowitz, a former deputy
domestic policy adviser to Bush who retains ties to the administration.
Mukasey attended Columbia University and then enrolled in Yale's law class
of 1967. His fellow students included Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.),
the late Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) and CBS senior political correspondent
Jeff Greenfield. Ackerman remembers sitting in classrooms with Mukasey "and
he had a more conservative disposition."
After Yale, Mukasey joined a New York law firm and, in 1972, became an
assistant U.S attorney in the criminal division of the Southern District of
New York. He was chief of the official corruption unit in his final year.
That experience could make Mukasey's attitudes toward federal prosecutors
markedly different from those of Alberto R. Gonzales, who was forced to
resign as attorney general after controversial firings of U.S. attorneys and
other efforts to rein in their autonomy. Mukasey "has longstanding ties and
love and respect for the U.S. attorney's office," said Daniel C. Richman, a
Columbia law school professor and former federal prosecutor in New York.
In 1976, Mukasey joined the law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler,
where he remained until assuming his judgeship in 1988. One of the firm's
clients was the FBI Agents Association. He returned to the law firm as a
partner when he retired from the bench last year.
It was during his time in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office that Mukasey
befriended Giuliani. Their friendship is close enough that Giuliani selected
Mukasey to preside over his inauguration as mayor in 1994, even though it
meant delaying the swearing-in by a day so that it would not fall on a
Saturday, the Jewish sabbath.
Mukasey gave Giuliani's presidential campaign two contributions totaling
$1,200 in March and June, and otherwise has made only one other donation,
$1,000 to Lieberman, public records show.
Mukasey told the Senate in 1987, shortly after Reagan nominated him to the
bench, that he had worked to get women admitted to the University Club of
New York and that he ultimately resigned because it had voted not to do so.
The vote "shows that sense and decency are not as common as I had thought,"
Mukasey said in a letter disclosed as part of his confirmation hearing at
the time.
While a judge, Mukasey earned largely positive reviews, though a group of
deputies from the U.S. Marshal's Service filed a grievance two years ago
complaining, in part, about the frequent trips to Mukasey's weekend house on
the eastern tip of Long Island. The complaint alleged that the judge and his
wife often insisted on being driven there "in dangerous weather conditions."
The grievance claimed that deputies "risked their lives for no other reason
than a protectee's arbitrary desire to be chauffeured to their secondary
residence."
But Ralph Rosado, a deputy who spent three years on the judge's detail, said
that Mukasey was a pleasure to work with. "He was always respectful of his
detail and very considerate," he said.
As a judge, Mukasey worked to keep references to his religion out of his
courtroom, according to friends, colleagues and his rabbi. A former law
clerk said Mukasey often dug up literary analogies for his opinions but
steered clear of the Bible. Still, his faith was discussed more than once
during terrorism trials in his court.
William M. Kunstler, a lawyer for one of the Muslim defendants in the 1993
World Trade Center bombing, asked Mukasey to recuse himself from the case
because he is Jewish. Kunstler accused the judge and his wife of having ties
to Israel that would influence his opinions.
In his official response, Mukasey wrote that "to respond to such inquiries
is to concede the relevance of the information" to the way he might rule
from the bench. Kunstler's widow, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, said that she
did not remember the incident but that Mukasey was one of the better judges
that she and her husband appeared before during their years of defense work
in New York.
Even on the cases that shed light on his ideology, Mukasey did not lean
consistently to the right. In a 1994 ruling that has raised concerns among
conservatives, he did not take a firm stance against abortion. In that case,
he denied asylum to a Chinese national, Jia-Ging Dong, who had helped his
wife try to elude Chinese officials who planned an abortion for her, because
the couple had already exceeded the government's one-child rule.
With other New York judges in 2001, Mukasey signed hundreds of
material-witness warrants, enabling the detention of hundreds of suspects on
grounds that they had critical information about the 2001 attacks to relay
to a grand jury. In the end, many were never called to testify.
Still, Mukasey told the Brooklyn law graduates: "Those people were not, as
has been suggested, held incommunicado. Each of them had to be brought
before the judge who issued the warrant, and each had the same right to a
lawyer that a criminal defendant has."
In 2003, Mukasey ruled that the Bush administration had the authority to
hold Padilla, a U.S. citizen initially suspected of plotting a "dirty bomb"
attack, as an enemy combatant, without charging him. But he ruled, against
the government's wishes, that Padilla was entitled to an attorney.
The Padilla case, Mukasey wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month,
illustrates "the inadequacy of the current approach to terrorism
prosecutions," because the administration was unable to use a confession he
made in military custody without legal counsel.
A Conservative Record, But Not in Lock Step
By Amy Goldstein and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 18, 2007; Page A01
The first spring after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the chief judge of the
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York spoke out in favor
of the assertive but highly controversial legal strategies the Bush
administration was using to detain hundreds of Middle Eastern men as
terrorism suspects.
The government was entirely justified in arresting such suspects on
immigrations violations and holding "a very small number of people" for a
considerable period on material-witness warrants, the judge, Michael B.
Mukasey, told graduating students in the Brooklyn Law School class of 2002.
Civil libertarians who criticized the detention campaign as an unprecedented
or unauthorized use of federal powers were spreading "breathless half-truths
and outright falsehoods," he said.
Mukasey's willingness to defend aggressive legal anti-terrorism measures
before a tough audience helps to explain his appeal to President Bush, who
nominated him yesterday as the next attorney general. Mukasey, 66, is a
former Reagan-era federal prosecutor and private lawyer who served as a
federal judge in New York's Manhattan for nearly two decades. Not a
nationally prominent figure, he is best known in legal circles for presiding
over two of the most high-profile terrorism cases that have come before the
courts in recent years: the trial of the "blind sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman for
plotting to blow up New York landmarks and the detention of Jose Padilla.
Those cases make him one of the few judges in the country who have as much
real-world experience in legal issues surrounding counterterrorism efforts.
Mukasey's views on national security law and executive power also reflect a
steady, if not absolute, conservatism that dates to his days as a quiet
outlier on a liberal campus as a Yale law student in the 1960s. It is a
conservatism that can be seen in some of his most significant rulings and
other writings over the past few years.
Mukasey is an Orthodox Jew who was raised in New York's Bronx, the only son
in a family led by a father who ran coin laundries. He has taken a path
through the Ivy League, worked at a law firm that represented such colorful
clients as Roy Cohn and Claus von Bulow, and been appointed by President
Ronald Reagan to one of the country's busiest federal courts. Since his days
as a young prosecutor, he has been a close friend and political supporter of
former mayor and current Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W.
Giuliani.
Despite his successes, Mukasey has not displayed a driving ambition or
political nature, according to lawyers, legal scholars, former law clerks,
classmates and others who have known him over the years. He wields a
razor-like sense of humor and can be stubborn about his ideas. "He's not an
ideologue for the sake of being an ideologue," said Andrew Ruffino, a former
law clerk of the nominee's. Said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor who
was a classmate of Mukasey's: "He is not a hyper-charged Federalist Society
type. He is not a glad-hand networker."
Mukasey's record from the bench of about 1,500 published opinions consists
mainly of non-ideological matters: dirty cops, entertainment-industry
rivalries and immigrant-smugglers.
Mukasey grew up in an apartment building in the Bronx and was 12 years
younger than his only sibling, a sister. He spent his college summers
working for a lumber company, a beer distributor and United Press
International.
Mukasey attended the Ramaz School, an Orthodox Jewish day school, and he
remains heavily involved in that community. His wife, Susan, was the
headmistress of the lower school. They are both members of Kehilat Jeshurun,
an Orthodox synagogue with a politically conservative congregation on
Manhattan's Upper East Side that is connected to the school. Another member
of the congregation is Mukasey's friend Jay Lefkowitz, a former deputy
domestic policy adviser to Bush who retains ties to the administration.
Mukasey attended Columbia University and then enrolled in Yale's law class
of 1967. His fellow students included Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.),
the late Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) and CBS senior political correspondent
Jeff Greenfield. Ackerman remembers sitting in classrooms with Mukasey "and
he had a more conservative disposition."
After Yale, Mukasey joined a New York law firm and, in 1972, became an
assistant U.S attorney in the criminal division of the Southern District of
New York. He was chief of the official corruption unit in his final year.
That experience could make Mukasey's attitudes toward federal prosecutors
markedly different from those of Alberto R. Gonzales, who was forced to
resign as attorney general after controversial firings of U.S. attorneys and
other efforts to rein in their autonomy. Mukasey "has longstanding ties and
love and respect for the U.S. attorney's office," said Daniel C. Richman, a
Columbia law school professor and former federal prosecutor in New York.
In 1976, Mukasey joined the law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler,
where he remained until assuming his judgeship in 1988. One of the firm's
clients was the FBI Agents Association. He returned to the law firm as a
partner when he retired from the bench last year.
It was during his time in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office that Mukasey
befriended Giuliani. Their friendship is close enough that Giuliani selected
Mukasey to preside over his inauguration as mayor in 1994, even though it
meant delaying the swearing-in by a day so that it would not fall on a
Saturday, the Jewish sabbath.
Mukasey gave Giuliani's presidential campaign two contributions totaling
$1,200 in March and June, and otherwise has made only one other donation,
$1,000 to Lieberman, public records show.
Mukasey told the Senate in 1987, shortly after Reagan nominated him to the
bench, that he had worked to get women admitted to the University Club of
New York and that he ultimately resigned because it had voted not to do so.
The vote "shows that sense and decency are not as common as I had thought,"
Mukasey said in a letter disclosed as part of his confirmation hearing at
the time.
While a judge, Mukasey earned largely positive reviews, though a group of
deputies from the U.S. Marshal's Service filed a grievance two years ago
complaining, in part, about the frequent trips to Mukasey's weekend house on
the eastern tip of Long Island. The complaint alleged that the judge and his
wife often insisted on being driven there "in dangerous weather conditions."
The grievance claimed that deputies "risked their lives for no other reason
than a protectee's arbitrary desire to be chauffeured to their secondary
residence."
But Ralph Rosado, a deputy who spent three years on the judge's detail, said
that Mukasey was a pleasure to work with. "He was always respectful of his
detail and very considerate," he said.
As a judge, Mukasey worked to keep references to his religion out of his
courtroom, according to friends, colleagues and his rabbi. A former law
clerk said Mukasey often dug up literary analogies for his opinions but
steered clear of the Bible. Still, his faith was discussed more than once
during terrorism trials in his court.
William M. Kunstler, a lawyer for one of the Muslim defendants in the 1993
World Trade Center bombing, asked Mukasey to recuse himself from the case
because he is Jewish. Kunstler accused the judge and his wife of having ties
to Israel that would influence his opinions.
In his official response, Mukasey wrote that "to respond to such inquiries
is to concede the relevance of the information" to the way he might rule
from the bench. Kunstler's widow, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, said that she
did not remember the incident but that Mukasey was one of the better judges
that she and her husband appeared before during their years of defense work
in New York.
Even on the cases that shed light on his ideology, Mukasey did not lean
consistently to the right. In a 1994 ruling that has raised concerns among
conservatives, he did not take a firm stance against abortion. In that case,
he denied asylum to a Chinese national, Jia-Ging Dong, who had helped his
wife try to elude Chinese officials who planned an abortion for her, because
the couple had already exceeded the government's one-child rule.
With other New York judges in 2001, Mukasey signed hundreds of
material-witness warrants, enabling the detention of hundreds of suspects on
grounds that they had critical information about the 2001 attacks to relay
to a grand jury. In the end, many were never called to testify.
Still, Mukasey told the Brooklyn law graduates: "Those people were not, as
has been suggested, held incommunicado. Each of them had to be brought
before the judge who issued the warrant, and each had the same right to a
lawyer that a criminal defendant has."
In 2003, Mukasey ruled that the Bush administration had the authority to
hold Padilla, a U.S. citizen initially suspected of plotting a "dirty bomb"
attack, as an enemy combatant, without charging him. But he ruled, against
the government's wishes, that Padilla was entitled to an attorney.
The Padilla case, Mukasey wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month,
illustrates "the inadequacy of the current approach to terrorism
prosecutions," because the administration was unable to use a confession he
made in military custody without legal counsel.