By Amy Goldstein and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The first spring after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York spoke out in favor of the assertive but highly controversial legal strategies the Bush administration was using to detain hundreds of Middle Eastern men as terrorism suspects.

The government was entirely justified in arresting such suspects on immigrations violations and holding "a very small number of people" for a considerable period on material-witness warrants, the judge, Michael B. Mukasey, told graduating students in the Brooklyn Law School class of 2002. Civil libertarians who criticized the detention campaign as an unprecedented or unauthorized use of federal powers were spreading "breathless half-truths and outright falsehoods," he said.

Mukasey's willingness to defend aggressive legal anti-terrorism measures before a tough audience helps to explain his appeal to President Bush, who nominated him yesterday as the next attorney general. Mukasey, 66, is a former Reagan-era federal prosecutor and private lawyer who served as a federal judge in New York's Manhattan for nearly two decades. Not a nationally prominent figure, he is best known in legal circles for presiding over two of the most high-profile terrorism cases that have come before the courts in recent years: the trial of the "blind sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman for plotting to blow up New York landmarks and the detention of Jose Padilla.

Those cases make him one of the few judges in the country who have as much real-world experience in legal issues surrounding counterterrorism efforts. Mukasey's views on national security law and executive power also reflect a steady, if not absolute, conservatism that dates to his days as a quiet outlier on a liberal campus as a Yale law student in the 1960s. It is a conservatism that can be seen in some of his most significant rulings and other writings over the past few years.

Mukasey is an Orthodox Jew who was raised in New York's Bronx, the only son in a family led by a father who ran coin laundries. He has taken a path through the Ivy League, worked at a law firm that represented such colorful clients as Roy Cohn and Claus von Bulow, and been appointed by President Ronald Reagan to one of the country's busiest federal courts. Since his days as a young prosecutor, he has been a close friend and political supporter of former mayor and current Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Despite his successes, Mukasey has not displayed a driving ambition or political nature, according to lawyers, legal scholars, former law clerks, classmates and others who have known him over the years. He wields a razor-like sense of humor and can be stubborn about his ideas. "He's not an ideologue for the sake of being an ideologue," said Andrew Ruffino, a former law clerk of the nominee's. Said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor who was a classmate of Mukasey's: "He is not a hyper-charged Federalist Society type. He is not a glad-hand networker."

Mukasey's record from the bench of about 1,500 published opinions consists mainly of non-ideological matters: dirty cops, entertainment-industry rivalries and immigrant-smugglers.

Mukasey grew up in an apartment building in the Bronx and was 12 years younger than his only sibling, a sister. He spent his college summers working for a lumber company, a beer distributor and United Press International.

Mukasey attended the Ramaz School, an Orthodox Jewish day school, and he remains heavily involved in that community. His wife, Susan, was the headmistress of the lower school. They are both members of Kehilat Jeshurun, an Orthodox synagogue with a politically conservative congregation on Manhattan's Upper East Side that is connected to the school. Another member of the congregation is Mukasey's friend Jay Lefkowitz, a former deputy domestic policy adviser to Bush who retains ties to the administration.

Mukasey attended Columbia University and then enrolled in Yale's law class of 1967. His fellow students included Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the late Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) and CBS senior political correspondent Jeff Greenfield. Ackerman remembers sitting in classrooms with Mukasey "and he had a more conservative disposition."

After Yale, Mukasey joined a New York law firm and, in 1972, became an assistant U.S attorney in the criminal division of the Southern District of New York. He was chief of the official corruption unit in his final year.

That experience could make Mukasey's attitudes toward federal prosecutors markedly different from those of Alberto R. Gonzales, who was forced to resign as attorney general after controversial firings of U.S. attorneys and other efforts to rein in their autonomy. Mukasey "has longstanding ties and love and respect for the U.S. attorney's office," said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia law school professor and former federal prosecutor in New York.

In 1976, Mukasey joined the law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler, where he remained until assuming his judgeship in 1988. One of the firm's clients was the FBI Agents Association. He returned to the law firm as a partner when he retired from the bench last year.

It was during his time in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office that Mukasey befriended Giuliani. Their friendship is close enough that Giuliani selected Mukasey to preside over his inauguration as mayor in 1994, even though it meant delaying the swearing-in by a day so that it would not fall on a Saturday, the Jewish sabbath.

Mukasey gave Giuliani's presidential campaign two contributions totaling $1,200 in March and June, and otherwise has made only one other donation, $1,000 to Lieberman, public records show.

Mukasey told the Senate in 1987, shortly after Reagan nominated him to the bench, that he had worked to get women admitted to the University Club of New York and that he ultimately resigned because it had voted not to do so. The vote "shows that sense and decency are not as common as I had thought," Mukasey said in a letter disclosed as part of his confirmation hearing at the time.

While a judge, Mukasey earned largely positive reviews, though a group of deputies from the U.S. Marshal's Service filed a grievance two years ago complaining, in part, about the frequent trips to Mukasey's weekend house on the eastern tip of Long Island. The complaint alleged that the judge and his wife often insisted on being driven there "in dangerous weather conditions." The grievance claimed that deputies "risked their lives for no other reason than a protectee's arbitrary desire to be chauffeured to their secondary residence."

But Ralph Rosado, a deputy who spent three years on the judge's detail, said that Mukasey was a pleasure to work with. "He was always respectful of his detail and very considerate," he said.

As a judge, Mukasey worked to keep references to his religion out of his courtroom, according to friends, colleagues and his rabbi. A former law clerk said Mukasey often dug up literary analogies for his opinions but steered clear of the Bible. Still, his faith was discussed more than once during terrorism trials in his court.

William M. Kunstler, a lawyer for one of the Muslim defendants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, asked Mukasey to recuse himself from the case because he is Jewish. Kunstler accused the judge and his wife of having ties to Israel that would influence his opinions.

In his official response, Mukasey wrote that "to respond to such inquiries is to concede the relevance of the information" to the way he might rule from the bench. Kunstler's widow, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, said that she did not remember the incident but that Mukasey was one of the better judges that she and her husband appeared before during their years of defense work in New York.

Even on the cases that shed light on his ideology, Mukasey did not lean consistently to the right. In a 1994 ruling that has raised concerns among conservatives, he did not take a firm stance against abortion. In that case, he denied asylum to a Chinese national, Jia-Ging Dong, who had helped his wife try to elude Chinese officials who planned an abortion for her, because the couple had already exceeded the government's one-child rule.

With other New York judges in 2001, Mukasey signed hundreds of material-witness warrants, enabling the detention of hundreds of suspects on grounds that they had critical information about the 2001 attacks to relay to a grand jury. In the end, many were never called to testify.

Still, Mukasey told the Brooklyn law graduates: "Those people were not, as has been suggested, held incommunicado. Each of them had to be brought before the judge who issued the warrant, and each had the same right to a lawyer that a criminal defendant has."

In 2003, Mukasey ruled that the Bush administration had the authority to hold Padilla, a U.S. citizen initially suspected of plotting a "dirty bomb" attack, as an enemy combatant, without charging him. But he ruled, against the government's wishes, that Padilla was entitled to an attorney.

The Padilla case, Mukasey wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month, illustrates "the inadequacy of the current approach to terrorism prosecutions," because the administration was unable to use a confession he made in military custody without legal counsel.

Staff writers Robert Barnes, Alec MacGillis, Susan Schmidt and Michael A. Fletcher; staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Rena Kirsch; and research director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.