The (Likely) New Attorney General on Immigration and National Security

Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen have a story in the Washington Post that reveals that the likely new Attorney General has signifgicant experience with immigration and the “war on terror.” According to the story, President Bush has selected retired federal judge Michael B. Mukasey as his new attorney general.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Mukasey to the be a U.S. District Court judge in the Southern District of New York. He spent the next 19 years as a federal judge before retireing in 2006 to return to the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler.

As a judge, Mukasey presided over the trials of Omar Abdel Rahman and others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also handled the early case against Jose Padilla, who was declared an “enemy combatant” by Bush in 2002. Mukasey ruled that the government had the power to make the declaration but found that Padilla should have access to his lawyers.

Mukasey was involved in other high-profile cases, including battles between insurance companies and a World Trade Center developer after Sept. 11, 2001s. He dismissed in 2004 lawsuits against an Italian insurance company for policies held by Holocaust victims.

During one 2004 speech, excerpts of which were published by the Wall Street Journal, Mukasey strongly defended the controversial USA Patriot Act.  He also defended a wave of terrorism-related immigration arrests by the FBI after Sept. 11. In an op-ed article last month for the Journal, Mukasey said that the Padilla case and others underscore the shortcomings of the regular criminal justice system for terrorism defendants, and he advocated some kind of alternative system for handling such cases.

Judge Mukasey’s issued a ruling in 1994 against Jia-Ging Dong, a Chinese man who sought asylum in the United States. Dong had argued that he would be persecuted if he was sent back to China, because he had attempted to help his wife avoid a forced abortion under the communist country’s one-child policy. Immigration courts had ruled against Dong and Mukasey agreed, upholding the government’s deportation order.

KJ