However, during confirmation hearings, controversy arose over Mukasey's responses to questions about torture. Mukasey refused to state a clear legal position on the interrogation technique known as waterboarding (in which water is poured over a rag on the prisoner's face to simulate drowning). Leahy and the other nine Democratic committee members indicated to Mukasey, via letter, that they were "deeply troubled by your refusal to state unequivocally that waterboarding is illegal during your confirmation hearing..."
Speaking in London on March 14, 2008, Mukasey said that he hopes the detainees currently charged with participating in the September 11 attacks are not executed if found guilty in order to avoid creating any martyrs. Speaking in New York on March 5, 2012, Mukasey said his comments in 2008 were taken out of context. His "martyr" comment was a humorous reason offered as the only reason not to seek the death penalty. He then said if the detainees were found guilty, they should be executed in the due process of the law and not make an exception.
On August 22, 2007, The Wall Street Journal published another op-ed by Mukasey, prompted by the resolution of the Padilla prosecution, in which he argued that "current institutions and statutes are not well suited to even the limited task of supplementing . . . a military effort to combat Islamic terrorism ." Mukasey instead advocated for Congress, which "has the constitutional authority to establish additional inferior courts," to "turn [its] considerable talents to deliberating how to fix a strained and mismatched legal system."
Born in New York City in 1941, Mukasey attended Ramaz School, graduated from Columbia College with a degree in history and received a Bachelor of Laws from Yale Law School.
Two days later, the Senate confirmed Mukasey by a 53–40 vote. The tight vote was the narrowest margin to confirm an attorney general in more than 50 years.
In 2009, legal ethics complaints were filed against Mukasey and other Bush administration attorneys for their roles in advocating torture.
Mukasey left office after Bush's term as President ended. He is currently a partner at the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. Mukasey, pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), is registered as working on behalf of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
Mukasey, however, fired back that it was Cuomo and his network that proposed the report itself and the information within it in a misleading way.
A former attorney general has slammed CNN host Chris Cuomo, accusing the host of "misleading" his audience about the Mueller investigation. Michael B. Mukasey, a former federal judge, and President George W. Bush’s attorney general, took Cuomo on during an interview on his show Tuesday night.
"It is, in fact, not the job of any counsel or anybody else to exonerate. God does that. Even juries that return acquittals don’t come back and say innocent, they say not guilty," Mukasey continued.
He was referring to a section of federal law making it a crime to file false crop or weather reports and forbidding federal employees to falsify financial records. A statute in that section, titled "Concealment, removal, and mutilation generally," provides that anyone who has custody of federal records and who "conceals, removes, mutilates, ...
Tillman quoted from a recent court opinion that said, "The democratic presumption is that any adult member of the polity ... is eligible to run for office" and Congress cannot "supplement these requirements."
Former U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey says he was wrong to suggest that if Hillary Clinton was ever convicted of destroying government records by erasing the contents of her email server, she would be legally unqualified for the presidency. The suggestion came Monday from Mukasey, a former federal judge who served as attorney general ...
The suggestion came Monday from Mukasey , a former federal judge who served as attorney general during former president George W. Bush's administration. He was also named as an early adviser to the Jeb Bush campaign.
On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Mukasey said "I think the more dangerous part of this, from her standpoint, is not so much the placement of the material here as wiping the server."
Former US attorney general Michael Mukasey says he was wrong to suggest that if Hillary Clinton was ever convicted of destroying government records by. Tap to Unmute.
Professor Tillman's (analysis) is spot on, and mine was mistaken.". The disqualification statute, Mukasey said in the e-mail, "may be a measure of how seriously Congress took the violation in question, and how seriously we should take it, but that's all it is.".
Mukasey and Giuliani have been friends since working at the same law firm in the early 1970s. Mukasey pledged to recuse himself from cases involving Giuliani. Newspaper reports assumed that Mukasey would further recuse himself from cases involving Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner under Giuliani, who was under federal investigation for bribery a…
Mukasey was born in 1941 in New York City. His father was born near Baranavichy in Belarus (then in the Russian Empire) and emigrated to the U.S. in 1921.
Mukasey graduated in 1959 from the Ramaz School, an independent (formerly boys' and now co-educational) Modern Orthodox Jewish prep school in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. His wife, Susan, was later a teacher and headmistress of the lower …
Mukasey practiced law for 20 years in New York City, serving for four years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in which he worked with Rudolph Giuliani. From 1967 to 1972, he was an associate with the law firm of Webster Sheffield Fleischmann Hitchcock & Brookfield, later known as Webster & Sheffield. In 1976, he joined the New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, to which he returned after retirement fro…
On July 27, 1987, Mukasey was nominated to be a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan by President Ronald Reagan, to a seat vacated by Abraham David Sofaer. Mukasey was confirmed by the United States Senate on November 6, 1987, and received his commission on November 9, 1987; he took the bench in 1988. He served in that position for 18 years, including tenure as Chief Judge from March 2000 t…
Although Article III of the U.S. Constitution entitles district court judges to hold their judicial appointments for life, in June 2006 Mukasey announced that he would retire as a judge and return to private practice at the end of the summer. On August 1, 2006, he was succeeded as Chief Judge of the Southern District by Judge Kimba Wood, entering senior status on the same day. Mukasey's retirement took effect on September 9, 2006. On September 12, 2006, Patterson Belk…
In May 2004, while still a member of the judiciary, Judge Mukasey delivered a speech (which he converted into a The Wall Street Journal opinion piece) that defended the USA PATRIOT Act; the piece also expressed doubt that the FBI engaged in racial profiling of Arabs and criticized the American Library Association for condemning the Patriot Act but not taking a position on librarians imprisoned in Cuba.
On September 17, 2007, Mukasey was nominated by President Bush to replace Alberto Gonzales as the Attorney General. At his nomination press conference with the President, Mukasey stated, "The task of helping to protect our security, which the Justice Department shares with the rest of our government, is not the only task before us. The Justice Department must also protect the safety of o…