Mukasey Made His Name With Terror Cases

WASHINGTON — Early in the Bush administration, Michael Mukasey’s position at the intersection of terrorism and the justice system may have cost him a promotion. Mr. Mukasey, then chief judge of the main federal court in New York City, caught the eye of the White House for elevation to the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. A conservative intellectual whose admirers cut across party lines, he was running the nation’s busiest courthouse just a mile from ground zero — one that had handled trials of Islamic radicals for nearly a decade.Mr. Mukasey was invited to Washington in the spring of 2002 and impressed lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department, several people familiar with the interview recalled.But that June, “dirty bomb” suspect Jose Padilla was declared an enemy combatant by President Bush. When Padilla’s lawyers challenged the government’s action, Mr. Mukasey drew the case. White House lawyers decided they could not offer Mr. Mukasey the appellate post without seeming to undermine his impartiality in a case important to the administration, those familiar with the issue said. Now, Mr. Mukasey’s experiences in the Padilla case and other terrorism prosecutions undergird his credentials for nomination to become attorney general. If confirmed by the Senate after hearings next week, the 66-year-old Bronx, N.Y., native will take over an embattled Justice Department. He will deal with Congress on national security issues that remain to be sorted out in the final year of the Bush administration — including rules for interrogating suspects and gathering evidence in terrorism cases.Mr. Mukasey recently argued in an opinion article for the Wall Street Journal that Congress should find new ways to relieve “a strained and mismatched legal system” that cannot adequately stop terrorist plots while guarding the rights of those suspected of hatching them. He has advocated creating national security courts for terrorism cases, where classified information could be presented to judges in secret.“If there is anybody who has a handle on the debate on terrorism issues, it’s him,” David Kelley, who served as U.S. attorney in New York between 2003 and 2005, said. “He is one of the only people who has sufficient practical experience together with the intellectual ability.”Mr. Mukasey is described by people who have worked with him as a serious-minded law-and-order judge, a reserved man whose work and life were shaped by terrorism cases and by the tight-knit clan of prosecutors and lawyers who orbit the District Court for the Southern District of New York.Especially long-lasting has been Mr. Mukasey’s relationship with the more outgoing Mayor Giuliani, a fellow federal prosecutor in the 1970s who went on to become mayor and is now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.In the late 1970s and ’80s, Messrs. Mukasey and Giuliani were among a group of high-powered former prosecutors who revitalized the litigation practice at the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb, and Tyler. Mr. Mukasey is now on the Giuliani campaign’s judicial advisory board, and his son works for Mr. Giuliani’s law firm. “It’s almost like a fraternity. Everybody thinks they are wearing a white hat doing good working for the government,” said Robert Morvillo, a former chief prosecutor of the Southern District’s criminal division and a former boss of both Messrs. Mukasey and Giuliani. Those two men “have grown up in the profession together,” he said.As a judge, Mr. Mukasey occasionally regaled his clerks with war stories from the old days. “He loved being an assistant U.S. attorney. I think that’s what defined him,” a former colleague who agreed to share private recollections of Mr. Mukasey’s days on the federal bench said.Although Mr. Giuliani stopped by for lunch occasionally, the colleague recalled, Mr. Mukasey recused himself from matters involving Mr. Giuliani as mayor. The White House has said that as attorney general he would recuse himself from the federal investigation of Bernard Kerik, Mr. Giuliani’s former police commissioner and then business associate, on tax issues and other matters.By the time of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Mr. Mukasey and his wife had already spent the better part of a decade under 24-hour armed protection. He had received death threats stemming from his 1995 trial of Egyptian Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the blind sheik, who along with nine co-defendants was convicted of conspiracy to blow up New York landmarks, including commuter tunnels and the World Trade Center. U.S. marshals were posted outside Mr. Mukasey’s chambers and his Upper East Side apartment. The judge was hustled around in an armored limousine with a chase car and sometimes bomb-sniffing dogs in tow.The case of the blind sheik presented Mr. Mukasey with vexing questions that have fueled public debate since September 11: how to ensure lawful treatment for suspected terrorists without impeding government efforts to protect citizens from attack.Prosecutors delved into a web of overlapping conspiracies — the murder of Zionist Rabbi Meir Kahane, a scheme to assassinate President Mubarak of Egypt, plots to blow up commuter tunnels, and the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center. Three years of litigation, including a nine-month trial, served as a “deep primer” on radical Islam, Mary Jo White, the former U.S. attorney who brought the case, said.Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution on the unusual charge of seditious conspiracy, recalled many months of litigation, some of it sealed, over questions about the limits of free speech and religious practice and the difficulty of prosecuting terrorism without making classified information public. “The arguments we’ve been having the last six years are the arguments we were having then,” Mr. McCarthy said.Courthouse colleagues said Mr. Mukasey spent hours hashing over those issues with one of the few people he was free to talk to — District Judge Kevin Duffy, who handled the related case against Ramzi Yousef for the World Trade Center truck bombing. Judge Duffy, too, was under constant armed guard.

Mukasey Made His Name With Terror Cases

Mukasey Made His Name With Terror Cases

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