Pete Williams has joined Ted Olson on the NAFUSA panel on the Supreme Court to be held on Saturday morning, September 27, 2013. Williams is an NBC News correspondent based in Washington. He has been covering the Justice Department and the U.S. Supreme Court since March 1993.

Prior to joining NBC, Williams served as a press official on Capitol Hill for many years. In 1986 he joined the Washington staff of then Congressman Dick Cheney as press secretary and a legislative assistant. In 1989, when Cheney was named assistant secretary of defense, Williams was appointed assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. While in that position, Williams was named Government Communicator of the Year in 1991 by the National Association of Government Communicators.

A native of Casper, Wyoming and a graduate of Stanford University, Williams was a reporter and news director at KTWO-TV and Radio in Casper from 1974 to 1985. Working with the Radio-Television News Directors Association, for which he served as a member of its board of directors, he successfully lobbied the Wyoming Supreme Court to permit broadcast coverage of its proceedings and twice sued Wyoming judges over pre-trial exclusion of reporters from the courtroom. For these efforts, he received a First Amendment Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, shown left, is reportedly resigning to become the president of the University of California university system.

Napolitano has led DHS from the beginning of the Obama administration. She has also served as the United States Attorney for the District of Arizona and the governor of the state. She was the keynote speaker at NAFUSA’s Santa Fe conference in 2011.

The NAFUSA DC Planning Committee, chaired by President Jay Stephens, has announced the early plans for this year’s NAFUSA conference to be held at the J.W. Marriott in Washington, DC, September 26-28, 2013.

On Saturday morning, September 28, NAFUSA member Ted Olson, shown left, will anchor a panel on the Supreme Court. Olson served as the solicitor general of the United States, 2001-2004. He also served as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, 1981-1984. He is currently a partner in the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Earlier this year, Olson was named one of “The Most Influential Lawyers in America” by the National Law Journal.

In March, he argued the historic case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, challenging California Proposition 8, which overturned a State Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage. Yesterday  the United States Supreme Court held the the case was not properly before the court. California officials had declined to appeal the trial court’s decision and proponents of Proposition 8 were determined by the Supreme Court to lack standing to step into the state’s shoes. The ruling left in place the trial court victory for two same-sex couples who had sought to marry, and is considered a major victory for Olson and David Boies, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

On Friday afternoon, following the morning CLE, the conference will hold a luncheon at the J.W. Marriott, and Charlie Savage, shown left, will once again join us, for the fourth year in a row. Savage will moderate a panel on drones.  Savage is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times. Savage covered national legal affairs for the Boston Globe from 2003 to 2008. He received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2007. His book about the growth of executive power, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, was named one of the best books of 2007 by both Slate and Esquire.

When the conference officially opens on Friday morning, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., shown right, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, will welcome conference attendees to Washington. Machen was nominated  by President Barack Obama on December 24, 2009 and confirmed by the United States Senate on February 11, 2010. He also serves as a member of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee.

Before Machen’s  appointment as U.S. Attorney, he was a partner at the law firm of Wilmer,  Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr and practiced in the firm’s Investigations and  Criminal Litigation group.  Before practicing at WilmerHale, Mr. Machen  served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the  District of Columbia from 1997 to 2001.
Machen joined the  U.S. Attorney’s Office in 1997 after having served as a law clerk to the  Honorable Damon J. Keith, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge for the Sixth Circuit.  Mr. Machen graduated from Harvard Law School in  1994.

During his career, Machen has been repeatedly recognized for his professional accomplishments. In  2012, he received a “Visionary Award” from the Legal Times for helping  to advance the practice of law during his time as U.S. Attorney.  In 2008,  the National Law Journal named him one of the “50 Most Influential  Minority Lawyers in America.” In 2007, The American Lawyer identified  him as one of the “50 Most Promising Litigators in America Under the Age of  45,” and in 2006, the Washingtonian magazine named him one of D.C.’s  “Top 40 Lawyers Under 40.”

On Friday afternoon, NAFUSA members will be invited for a “Day at Justice” in the Great Hall at Main Justice, where we will meet with senior DOJ officials. The planning committee is also working on two additional panels; one of government enforcement hot topics and one of criminal litigation ethics. Details will be announced soon.

Conference social events will include a Thursday cocktail reception on the Jones Day rooftop overlooking the Capitol, Friday evening class reunion dinners, a Saturday Potomac River cruise, and a concluding Saturday evening banquet.

Professor Rory K. Little, U.C. Hastings College of Law, spoke on ethics at the Atlanta NAFUSA conference in 2012. Prof. Little publishes Supreme Court Case Summaries: Professor Rory Little’s Perspective, a service from the ABA Criminal Justice Section. They are published soon after the Supreme Court’s opinions are released. Click here for his summaries for the term which ended in June 2012.

Prof. Little is also now on the “masthead” for SCOTUSBlog, for criminal cases. Here is a recent item he posted. Other SCOTUSBlog post from Prof Little can be viewed by clicking on his “bio” at the top of the posting.

The NAFUSA officers and board of directors held their annual spring meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, May 4, 2013. On the evening before the meeting, NAFUSA Treasurer Bart Daniel and his wife, Cindy, hosted a reception at their lovely historic Charleston home, a half block from the Battery. Daniel arranged  horse and buggy transportation to the restaurant for dinner.

The meeting was held on Saturday morning and chaired by President Jay Stephens, who informed the group of the developing plans for the September conference to be held at the J.W. Marriott in Washington, DC, September 26-28, 2013. The fall conference will open with a cocktail reception on the Jones Day roof top, which overlooks the Capitol. Friday and Saturday mornings will include the usual CLE programs, and the planning committee is working on three panels: government regulation hot topics, criminal litigation ethics and the United States Supreme Court. The committee is also planning a cruise on the Potomac and the conference will conclude with a banquet and business meeting on Saturday evening. More details are expected soon.

There were additional reports on finances, membership, nominations, the Bradford Award, the DOJ liaison committee and the NAFUSA Foundation. Presdient Elect Don Stern announced the 2014 conference will be held on October 9-11, at the Fairmont Copley Plaza. The 2015 conference will be held in Phoenix or Scotsdale, and the 2016 conference in San Diego.

As is the NAFUSA custom, board members and officers were responsible for their own travel and lodging expenses. Click here to view more photos from the Charleston meeting.

Charlie Savage, a national security reporter for The New York Times has appeared at the past three NAFUSA conferences as the moderator or panel member on important topical issues. At NAFUSA’s New York conference in 2010, Savage, shown above at the podium, moderated the two hour panel discussion on “The Appropriate Forum to Prosecute Terrorism Cases.” Panel members included NAFUSA members Ken Wainstein and David Iglesias, together with U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, Eugene Fidell of Yale Law School and Matthew Waxman of Columbia Law School.

Savage continues his reporting on this important topic and on Sunday, January 27, He penned his first Sunday Review piece in The Times: Who Decides the Laws of War?

Savage writes of the dispute between Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, chief prosecutor of the military commissions system and the Obama administration. Martins is the lead prosecutor in the procedings against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others charged with aiding the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The issue, as Savage describes:

is it valid for the United States to use tribunals to charge idiosyncratic American offenses like “conspiracy,” even though they are not recognized as war crimes under international law?

The current dispute traces back to an appeals court ruling in October that vacated a tribunal’s verdict in 2008 against an Al Qaeda driver because his offense, “material support for terrorism,” was not a recognized international war crime at the time of his actions. The judges rejected the Justice Department’s argument that the charge was nevertheless valid under an American “common law of war” and because Congress had listed the crime as an offense for the tribunals in a 2006 statute.

General Martins pushed to abandon the conviction in another case which relied upon the charge of “conspiracy”, which is not recognized as an international war crime. He has, however, been overruled by Attorney General Eric Holder. General Martins refused to sign the Justice Department brief, but has been overruled by the Pentagon.

The issue is complicated by the action of Congress forbidding the prosecution of Guantanamo detainees in federal court, where they could be prosceuted for offenses such as conspiracy.

Savage quotes another of the NAFUSA New York panel members, Eugene Fidell:

“It’s tempting to view this as about General Martins, but it’s not,” he said. “Decisions about prosecuting detainees have become about what is feasible as opposed to what is rational. The constraints imposed by Congress are forcing officials into contorted positions which are particularly uncomfortable for military lawyers, who don’t want to get near the ‘third rail’ of destroying reciprocity.”

The Santa Fe NAFUSA conference in 2011 featured a two hour panel discussion on WikiLeaks. The above photo shows panelists Charlie Savage and Valerie Plame Wilson. More than a year later, issues relating to WikiLeaks continue in the news. On the front page of this morning’s New York Times, Savage co-authors with Scott Shane an article dealing with the on-going military proceedings at Fort Meade involving Private Bradley Manning. Read: In Wiki-Leaks Case, Defense Puts Jailers on Trial.

Savage and Shane write:

It seemed incongruous that he has essentially acknowledged responsibility for the largest leak of classified material in history. The material included a quarter-million State Department cables whose release may have chilled diplomats’ ability to do their work discreetly but also helped fuel the Arab Spring; video of American helicopter crews shooting people on the ground in Baghdad who they thought were enemy fighters but were actually Reuters journalists; field reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and confidential assessments of the detainees locked up at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The proceedings at Fort Meade involve a request by Manning’s lawyer to dismiss the charges on the grounds that his pretrial treatment was unlawful. As The Times notes, that outcome appears unlikely. Manning still faces a court-martial, scheduled for March.

As for Julian Assange, Savage and Shane report:

As the military pursues the case against Private Manning, the Justice Department continues to explore the possibility of charging WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, or other activists with the group, possibly as conspirators in Private Manning’s alleged offense. Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., are still assigned to that investigation, according to law enforcement officials, but it is not clear how active they have been lately in presenting evidence to a grand jury.

NAFUSA historian and past president John E. Clark, shown above at the Atlanta conference, was one of thirteen former United States Attorneys and one former assistant attorney general who met in New Orleans 33 years ago to form NAFUSA. After the Atlanta conference, Clark took a few minutes to describe this event in the attached The Founding of NAFUSA: Why and How It Came To Be.

As Clark describes:

All were veterans of the Nixon and Ford administrations. All had held office during difficult times for United States Attorneys. Their experiences had left them firmly convinced that the office of United States Attorney is uniquely essential to the fulfillment of every president’s constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and that protecting the independence and integrity of the office they had held is a cause that transcends politics. Their deliberations in New Orleans resulted in the creation of NAFUSA, a non-profit organization whose charter reflects a non-partisan commitment to protecting and furthering the integrity, independence and effectiveness of the office.

The NAFUSA Newsletter – 3-15-79 also describes the initial meeting in New Orleans. Clark was elected the organization’s first secretary and became president a few years later. According to Clark,

The 1980 meeting was held in Washington, D.C.  At that meeting the question where to meet in 1981 was discussed at an informal gathering of the board and the officers.  A few wives were present, and Harriet Crampton, Scott’s wife, said, “I’ve always liked San Antonio.  Can we go there?”  And so it was decided.

Clark served as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, 1975-1977. He currenty practices law with Goode, Casseb, Jones, Riklin, Choate & Watson, P.C. in San Antonio.

At NAFUSA’s annual conference in Atlanta in October, H. Marshall Jarrett, the director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, gave the State of the Department address. Jarrett told the conference that civil cases were up  10% in fiscal year 2012 but criminal cases were down 8.4% from the all time high in 2011. He said it was not a surprise as staffing was down 850 employees and constituted a return to 2008 levels. A hiring freeze remains in effect, with federal pay raises frozen for the past two years.

Jarrett mentioned a bright note in that collections are expected to be $13 billion in fiscal year 2012 compared to the Department’s appropriated budget of just under $2 billion for the year.