By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A03

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey may have spent nearly two decades as a federal judge, but he confessed yesterday that he still gets the jitters.

As he prepares to argue the government's side in a Supreme Court case next week, Mukasey told reporters that he has already endured two dress rehearsals -- and may do a third before his turn at the high court Tuesday.

He will ask the justices to reinstate one count in a criminal conviction of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian terrorist who drove a car full of explosives across the border in the final days of 1999, in what authorities have called a millennial bombing plot. At issue is whether Ressam's conviction on a charge of carrying explosives while committing another felony should be restored.

"You mean, am I nervous?" Mukasey asked reporters assembled in his ornate conference room yesterday. "Yes. This is probably the first and only case I'm ever going to argue" before the high court, he said.

The informal session marked his second news roundtable since joining the department in November. In the course of an hour, Mukasey cracked jokes, asked an interlocutor not to address him with the honorary title "General" and continued to field questions even after his media director moved to get up from the table.

Mukasey's style contrasted markedly with that of his predecessor, Alberto R. Gonzales, who rarely shared his views with the press and held few unscripted public appearances.

The Bronx-born Mukasey drew international attention last week during a news conference in London, where he told the audience that he was "kind of hoping that" accused terrorists about to be tried before U.S. military commissions would not be sentenced to death lest it fulfill their desire to become "martyrs." But yesterday, he declined to comment further on the issue.

He also affirmed that his conversations with the president were private and should remain so. "One of the things I have to do as attorney general is watch my mouth, as we used to say in my old neighborhood," Mukasey said.

But he took on several other hot topics: It is, he said, too soon to consider creating an Enron-style Justice Department task force to police fraud in the subprime mortgage lending industry, even though the FBI has opened 17 criminal probes into possible wrongdoing by mortgage lenders, investment banks and other companies. Securities regulators are investigating two dozen more.

"We're still looking for information that's coming in and legal theories to answer the questions of what prosecutions can be brought and whether there's a . . . larger criminal story that can be told here," Mukasey said.

As he has previously, Mukasey argued for congressional reauthorization of a government surveillance initiative contained in the Protect America Act. The law expired last month, and the administration is pressing the House of Representatives to rework its plan to mesh with Senate legislation. Negotiations have foundered over the issue of retroactive legal protections for telecommunications companies that helped federal authorities after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mukasey said it is difficult to see a path to compromise at this point. "The fatwas and other [terrorist] directives do not have an expiration date," Mukasey warned. "The only weapon we have is intelligence. A large part of that is electronic intelligence."

As chief judge in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Mukasey handled numerous terrorism cases, including the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, commonly known as the "blind sheik," who was accused of plotting to blow up numerous sites in New York. But Mukasey expressed surprise at the variety of threats he hears about in morning briefings.