A New Attorney General

The name of the gentleman leaked to become Attorney General was ! announced as the President's nominee for Attorney General this morning.

Judge Michael Mukasey was nominated by Ronald Reagan to the federal bench in 1987. In his role as a federal judge, he has presided over a number of high profile national security cases and is viewed as an expert on such subjects.

He takes the unusual step of actually reading laws, which perhaps makes him uniquely qualified to be Attorney General. In a 2004 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, he commented that the Patriot Act had, "become a focus of a good deal of hysteria, some of it reflexive, much of it recreational," and that "[i]t helps not to conduct the debate in terms that suggest it gives the government the power to investigate us based on what we read, or that people who work for the government actually have the inclination to do such a thing, not to mention the spare time."

Mukasey was the judge in the Jose Padilla case and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman.