On the Heels of the Spitzer Bust, Will Michael Garcia Test Politics?

[WSJ_law_blog]

Will Manhattan U.S. attorney Michael Garcia — in the wake of his big Spitzer bust — run for politics, head for the private sector or remain a prosecutor? That’s the question posed today in this piece, by the NY Sun’s Joseph Goldstein.

“If the guy’s interested in political life,” the chairman of New York’s Republican Party, Joseph Mondello, told Goldstein, “we certainly need all the people with the fire in their belly we can find.” With the exceptions of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, DA Robert Morgenthau and Governor Thomas Dewey, it’s reportedly uncommon for Manhattan prosecutors to use their position as a jumping off point for elective office. Garcia did not offer comment for the story.

Garcia, an Albany Law graduate and 46 year-old Republican who’s married to an FBI agent, has largely eschewed political company in favor of law enforcement officials, reports Goldstein. “He’s unknown in New York City political circles,” the president of New York Civic, Henry Stern, said.

According to the piece, Garcia’s only employment in state government came when he clerked for Judge Judith Kaye of New York’s Court of Appeals, from 1990 to 1992. Then he joined the U.S. attorneys office, spending much of the 1990’s prosecuting and investigating Islamic terrorism cases.

At the beginning of the first Bush administration, Garcia served as an assistant secretary for homeland security. (Here’s an NYT profile of Garcia from 2006.) Recently, Garcia has indicted state assemblyman and labor leader, Brian McLaughlin, which led to a criminal conviction, and caught Governor Eliot Spitzer on a wiretap ordering the services of a prostitute.

Should the next president decide to replace Garcia with another U.S. attorney, Goldstein reports that, based on the speculation of “lawyers and Justice Department sources,” the office’s no. 2, Lev Dassin, who returned to the prosecutor’s office from Kaye Scholer a couple years ago, would take his spot. (Here’s an NYT piece from 1997 that recounts Dassin’s prosecution of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the WTC bomber.) When AG Michael Mukasey was a federal judge in Manhattan, he chose Dassin to co-teach a class with him at Columbia, according to the NY Sun piece, an arrangement that lasted eight years.