# Michael Mukasey **Michael B. Mukasey** (b. 1941, Bronx, NY) is a former federal judge who served as **Attorney General of the United States from 2007 to 2009**, taking over the Justice Department in the wreckage of the Alberto Gonzales tenure. Columbia (A.B. 1963) and Yale Law (LL.B. 1967); an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1972 to 1976, where he ran the Official Corruption Unit; nominated to the SDNY bench by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and confirmed that November; chief judge of that court from 2000 to 2006. On the bench he handled the highest-profile terrorism matters of the era, including the seditious-conspiracy prosecution of Omar Abdel-Rahman and the enemy-combatant detention of Jose Padilla. His 2007 confirmation as Attorney General became a flashpoint when he **declined to say whether waterboarding constituted torture**, and his tenure is associated with an expansive reading of executive power in the national-security context. His son is **[[Marc Mukasey]]**, the white-collar defense lawyer whose client roster runs through [[Donald Trump]]'s businesses and the crypto-fraud docket. The elder Mukasey's long professional association with [[Rudy Giuliani]] — the two overlapped as SDNY prosecutors — is the channel through which his son entered Giuliani's, and later Trump's, orbit. He has remained an active conservative legal commentator since leaving government, and has occasionally broken with Trump-era Justice Department conduct; he publicly described the Mar-a-Lago special-master order issued by [[Aileen Cannon]] as "deeply flawed." ## Cross-references - Son and legal-network heir: [[Marc Mukasey]] - Shared SDNY lineage: [[Rudy Giuliani]] - Conservative legal infrastructure: [[Federalist Society]] > [!note] Stub > Expand: waterboarding testimony in full, the Padilla rulings, post-government advisory affiliations, and his written record on executive power.