CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Know
Your Attorney General
21 Corporate Crime Reporter 37, September 20, 2007
No, we are not talking about Judge Michael Mukasey.
The Senate will not vote on Mukasey’s nomination until sometime in October.
We are talking about Peter Keisler, the acting Attorney General.
Keisler headed the Department of Justice’s Civil Division.
And believe it or not, the people who like the False Claims Act like Keisler.
“Peter Keisler is a first-rate legal mind, and one of those good government guys that brings honor to the notion of public service,” said Patrick Burns of the Washington, D.C.-based Taxpayers Against Fraud. “ We were saddened to hear of his announced departure from the Department of Justice, but thrilled to hear he has agreed to stay on for a few weeks as acting Attorney General.”
Burns said that under Keisler's leadership of the Civil Division, more amicus curiae briefs than ever before have been filed in support of whistleblower cases filed under the False Claims Act.
“The interest of the Department in these matters is pretty clear,” Burns said. “They want strong case law to be made, and they do not want activist jurists to make bad precedents that will undermine the government's ability to go after liars, cheats and thieves in the future.”
It was under Keisler's leadership that the largest annual False Claims Act recoveries have been won – over $3 billion last year alone. This has been done without an increase in personnel, and with real cuts at the U.S. Attorney level, Burns said.
“People think of the U.S. government as this great grey glob, but in fact, it's made up of small departments doing heroic and valiant work in the face of nearly impossible odds,” Burns told Corporate Crime Reporter. “That's certainly true in the False Claims Act arena, where a few dozen lawyers in the Civil Division face off each and every morning against an unlimited and rising tide of corporate lawyers who have nearly unlimited budgets and resources to defend multi-billion dollar fraud schemes.”
“We always felt that under Keisler, the Civil Division was being run by an open, smart, and honorable man who recognized the value of developing public-private partnerships to recover America's stolen billions,” Burns said.
Before joining the Department of Justice in July 2003, Keisler was a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, where he specialized in general and appellate litigation and telecommunications law.
He also served as Associate Counsel to the President during the Reagan Administration, and as a law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Robert H. Bork of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Keisler, a native of Woodmere, N.Y., graduated magna cum laude from Yale College in 1981. He earned his law degree in 1985 from Yale Law School, where he served on the Yale Law Journal.
Keisler has been nominated by President Bush for a position as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
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