WASHINGTON (AP) – A federal prosecutor who helped put a former Democratic lawmaker behind bars was named Wednesday as the Justice Department’s No. 2 official.

Craig S. Morford, currently the U.S. attorney in Nashville, was tapped by President Bush to become acting deputy attorney general, the Justice Department said. He will replace Paul McNulty, who announced his resignation in June.

Mr. Morford is a career prosecutor who has pursued organized crime and public corruption in Ohio, Michigan and Tennessee for the past 20 years.

He is perhaps best known for his case against former Representative James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat convicted in 2002 of accepting bribes and gifts from businessmen in exchange for intervening with government agencies. Traficant is serving an eight-year sentence in a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

In a 2005 interview, Mr. Morford said his philosophy is to stick close to the evidence and let politics go by the wayside.

“You take the facts that you have and you do the right thing,” he said then. “I’m not afraid of making hard decisions. I’m not afraid of going after anybody if it’s the appropriate thing to do.”

His appointment comes at a sensitive time for the Justice Department. Democrats contend that politics motivated last year’s controversial firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

Congress is investigating the ousters. The department also has launched an internal inquiry into whether career attorneys were hired by Attorney General Gonzales and his top aides on the basis of their loyalty to the Republican Party – a violation of federal law.

Senate Democrats have made clear they want a career prosecutor in the Justice Department’s No. 2 job as a condition for confirmation. Mr. Morford will hold the job in an acting capacity, which does not require confirmation. It was not clear whether Bush intends to nominate Morford for the job on a permanent basis.

Mr. Morford “starts out with one thing going for him: He’s a career prosecutor and not a politician,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the Justice Department’s most vocal critics. “We’ll be watching closely to make sure that the rule of law comes first and foremost under his watch.”
Mr. Gonzales highlighted Morford’s credibility as a career prosecutor.

“With 20 years of experience as a Justice Department prosecutor, I am pleased to have a person of Mr. Morford’s exemplary character and integrity in this critical position at this time,” Gonzales said in a statement.
In Nashville and Detroit, Morford served as interim U.S. attorney – meaning he was presidentially appointed but not confirmed by the Senate. He has been in Nashville for less than a year.

In 2004, Mr. Morford was named a Justice Department special counsel, tasked with reviewing the convictions of three North African immigrants in the nation’s first major terrorism prosecution after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Ultimately, he recommended that a federal judge toss out verdicts against two of the men after finding that government prosecutors failed to turn over documents to the defense lawyers. He also served a seven-month stint as U.S. attorney there.

Earlier, as an assistant U.S. attorney who at one point oversaw all criminal investigations in the Cleveland federal prosecutor’s office, Morford directed a 10-year corruption probe that led to scores of convictions in the Youngstown area. He also was a trial attorney with the Internal Revenue Service from 1984 to 1987.

Morford received his law degree from Valparaiso University.

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