The transcript of the President's announcement of the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey to be Attorney General is now available. Devlin Barrett of AP has this long story.

Judge Mukasey's best known cases during his judicial tenure are both terrorism related. He presided over the trial of the first World Trade Center bombing case. He also handled the Padilla case, which eventually went to the Supreme Court. His opinion in that case is in the appendix to the government's certiorari petition, which we have uploaded here. The opinion is pages 76a-162a of the petition, which are pages 111-201 of the PDF file. The published version is Padilla v. Bush, 233 F. Supp. 2d 564 (DC SDNY, 2002).

It is a thoughful and well-written opinion. We at CJLF disagreed with Judge Mukasey's conclusion on jurisdiction in this brief, and the Supreme Court overturned it in Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 542 U.S. 426 (2004). However, the issue was unsettled until the Supreme Court's decision, so it was within the realm of reasonable disagreement at the time.

Pending confirmation of Judge Mukasey, AAG Peter Keisler will be acting AG, so SG Paul Clement can go back to his main job.

Update: AP has this collection of Mukasey musings. My favorite is refusal to accept a mental mitigation argument in sentencing for a terrorist plot. "Forgive me if it sounds coldhearted, but people who are killed by people with limited capacity are just as dead as people killed by geniuses."

Scott Horton at Balkinization calls for confirmation.