Legal News

Succession Plan at DOJ Takes Shape: MD, AL, GA Big Winners

By Dan Slater

What with pardon decisions pending and legacies to burnish, President Bush is surely busy these days. But what we didn’t know, until this executive order, issued today, crossed our desk, is that Bush is also consumed with planning for pretty, well, unlikely contingencies.

Pursuant to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, Bush has ordered that, if the Attorney General, the Deputy AG, the Associate AG, and the officers designated by the AG happen to die, resign or otherwise become unable to perform, the following U.S. Attorneys, in the order listed, shall perform the duties of the AG’s office.

We called the White House to figure out why this was done today and why these folks were chosen, but haven’t yet heard back. In any event, here are the selections:

U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland: Rod J. Rosenstein (UPenn, Harvard Law). Rosenstein clerked for Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Now, in addition to his U.S. Attorney duties, he teaches at the U. of Maryland School of Law and the U. of Baltimore School of Law. He also serves on the faculty of a trial advocacy seminar at Georgetown U. Law Center. With that winning smile we have no doubt that Rosenstein would make a fine stand-in.


U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama: Deborah J. Rhodes (Rutgers Law). She began her career clerking for J. William Ditter, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Rhodes went on to become an AUSA in San Diego, where she served as chief of the appellate section and deputy chief of the narcotics enforcement section. As a trial attorney with the Justice’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, Philadelphia Strike Force, Rhodes tried cases involving the Scarfo crime family and others in federal courts in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Delaware. PBS featured one of these cases in a documentary titled “Mobfathers.”


U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia: David Nahmias (Duke, Harvard Law). Nahmias clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He arrived at Justice in 1995, after a stint at Hogan & Hartson. His wife, Catherine M. O’Neil, is a partner at King & Spalding in Atlanta. She formerly served as an AUSA in Atlanta and as Associate Deputy AG and Director of the Executive Office for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces in Washington.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 09, 2008 (boomark / email).