White House set to nominate former Justice deputy to be District’s U.S. attorney
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Version 0 of 1. The White House has selected Jessie K. Liu, a former Justice Department deputy assistant attorney general, to be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, according to two people with direct knowledge of the choice. As the District’s top prosecutor, Liu, 44, would oversee the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s office, which has more than 300 prosecutors. The District’s office, unlike other U.S. attorney’s offices across the nation, handles local and federal cases, a breadth that takes in street-level crimes in the District and high-level national security prosecutions as well as corruption cases against federal officials. Liu would need Senate confirmation to take over the post held by Channing D. Phillips, who was nominated in 2015 by President Barack Obama. Phillips’s removal from the District’s top law enforcement job was not unexpected. When President Trump took office, he announced that he would be replacing U.S. attorneys across the country. [Channing Phillips nominated as U.S. attorney] In the weeks before the presidential election, Liu signed up to serve as a member of Trump’s Justice Department transition team. Liu did not return calls Friday seeking comment. She is deputy general counsel at the Treasury Department while awaiting a formal nomination announcement and confirmation proceedings. A Justice Department spokesman and the White House press office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Liu, a Yale Law School graduate, would be making a return to the D.C. office where she worked as a prosecutor from 2002 to 2006, a period that overlapped with Phillips’s time as a front-line prosecutor. She left in 2006 to join the Department of Justice’s national security division, then served from 2007 to 2009 as a deputy assistant attorney general supervising the civil rights division’s appellate, employment litigation and housing and civil rights enforcement sections. Roscoe C. Howard Jr., U.S. attorney for the District from 2001 to 2004, when Liu was an assistant prosecutor, called her “smart, hard-working, very capable and a terrific pick.” Howard added that Liu would be helped by her background in Washington in the Justice Department as well as in private practice, where her focus was on white-collar crime litigation. “She knows the office and the office knows her,” Howard said. Last April, Liu was hired as a partner at the District law firm of Morrison & Foerster but left after about a year. Previously, Liu worked at the law firm Jenner & Block, where she focused on white-collar criminal defense, advising and defending government contractors facing investigations or enforcement actions, according to Jenner & Block’s website. Liu would be taking up her post under a White House directive that federal prosecutors charge criminal defendants with the most serious provable crimes carrying the heaviest penalties. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has set out the directive, which overturns the criminal charging policy of former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. As head of the U.S. attorney’s office, Liu would oversee the prosecution of cases including the scheduled September trial in federal court of Benghazi terrorism suspect Ahmed Abu Khattala. Khattala is charged in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and fellow Americans Sean Smith, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty in attacks on U.S. compounds in the Libyan city in 2012. Liu also would be coming to the office as it prepares for the 2018 murder trial of a Maryland man charged with the 2015 slayings in Northwest Washington of Savvas and Amy Savopoulos, their son Philip, 10, and the family’s housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa. Liu clerked in the late 1990s for Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. King, a 1979 Jimmy Carter appointee and former chief circuit judge, said Liu “is an excellent, excellent lawyer, and she has a very pleasant demeanor, and I would say not a partisan.” “She’s someone I think of as a lawyer of the highest caliber who has a reputation from anyone who’s worked with her as a hard-working, diligent attorney whose work product is trusted and of the highest caliber,” said John P. Carlin, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s National Security Division from 2013 until last October. Carlin is now a partner at Morrison & Foerster and has known Liu since both were assistant U.S. attorneys. This year, the office of Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) sent a letter to the White House asking Trump to allow the delegate to have some input in the nomination, said Norton spokesman Benjamin Fritsch. Fritsch said the White House did not respond to the letter, and on Friday he reiterated a statement Norton’s office had made earlier about the selection process. “Once again, the Trump administration has left the District of Columbia out of the process in selecting a particularly important federal official, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who uniquely prosecutes nearly all of our local adult crimes here,” the statement said. Ann E. Marimow and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report. |