Steve Engel | |
---|---|
United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel | |
In office November 13, 2017 –January 20, 2021 | |
President | Donald Trump |
Preceded by | Curtis E. Gannon |
Succeeded by | Christopher H. Schroeder |
Personal details | |
Born | Steven Andrew Engel June 29,1974 New Hyde Park,New York,U.S. |
Political party | Republican |
Spouse | Susan Kearns (m. 2004) |
Education | Harvard University (BA) University of Cambridge (MPhil) Yale University (JD) |
Steven Andrew Engel (born June 29, 1974) [1] [2] is an American lawyer. He served as the United States assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel in the first Trump administration. [3] Engel, who previously worked in the George W. Bush administration as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, was nominated by President Donald Trump on January 31, 2017, and confirmed on November 7, 2017. [4]
Engel was born on June 29, 1974, in New Hyde Park, New York, a Long Island suburb of New York City. [1] He was raised in Port Washington, New York, and graduated as valedictorian from Paul D. Schreiber Senior High School in 1992. He then earned a bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1996. [1] [5]
From 1996 to 1997, Engel was a Knox Fellow at the University of Cambridge. [1] [6] [7] He attended Yale Law School afterwards and earned a Juris Doctor in 2000. [1] He then clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, followed by a clerkship under Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States. [1] [8] [3]
Engel practiced law at Kirkland & Ellis from 2002 to 2006 [1] before serving as deputy assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush administration from 2006 to 2009. [1] In June 2009, Engel became a partner at Dechert, an international law firm. [6] [5] [3]
On January 31, 2017, the White House announced that President Donald Trump intended to nominate Engel to serve as the Assistant Attorney General heading the Office of Legal Counsel. [4] [2] Engel's nomination was opposed by U.S. Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war who was tortured while in captivity. McCain cited Engel's involvement in commenting on and reviewing one of the so-called "Torture memos" that signed off on six different "enhanced interrogation techniques." [9] Various human rights groups expressed concerns about Engel's nomination, also citing his involvement with the July 20, 2007, memo authored by Steven G. Bradbury, then-head of the OLC. [10] The Senate Judiciary Committee received support for the nomination from former Attorneys General Mukasay and Gonzales, other former senior executive branch officials, and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association of the City of New York. [11] Engel was confirmed by a 51–47 vote, largely along party lines with one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin (West Virginia), voting in favor of confirmation. [12]
In November 2017, Engel issued an opinion supporting the President's appointment of Mick Mulvaney as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Vacancies Reform Act. [13]
In April 2018, Engel approved airstrikes launched by President Trump against facilities associated with Syria's chemical-weapons program without congressional authorization. [14]
In March 2019, the special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller released its findings, the Mueller report, to Attorney General William Barr. Barr tasked the Office of Legal Counsel with authoring a memorandum that would justify the decision Barr had already made to clear Trump on the charges of obstruction of justice. [15] [16] [17] This memorandum was written in tandem with the Barr letter over the course of two days; [18] the final version was signed by Engel and Ed O'Callaghan. [16] [17] [19] [20] The DOJ initially kept the memo secret. [20] The watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington launched a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Justice Department, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in August 2022, ordered the memo's public release. [17] The D.C. Circuit held that the memo was not shielded from disclosure by the deliberative process privilege, because then-Attorney General Barr had already determined, by the time the memo was written, that DOJ would not charge Trump with a crime, making the memo akin to a "thought experiment." [17]
In May 2019, Engel issued an opinion concluding that the former White House Counsel, Don McGahn, was immune from compelled congressional testimony. [21] The House Judiciary Committee challenged that decision, and Engel's opinion was rejected by U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was later nominated by Joe Biden to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Jackson's opinion was twice reversed by a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit. [22]
In June 2019, Engel issued an OLC opinion supporting the Justice Department's decision not to release Donald Trump's tax returns. [23]
In September 2019, Engel authored the OLC opinion [24] [25] of the Justice Department to not forward the Trump–Ukraine scandal whistleblower complaint [26] to Congress. The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency concluded that Engel's opinion had a "chilling effect on effective oversight" and was "wrong as a matter of law and policy"; urging him to withdraw or modify it. [27] [28] [29] Engel responded that the opinion had simply applied the law as it was written and that it did not construe the statutory provisions protecting whistleblowers. [30]
In a letter dated November 3, 2019, Engel argued that White House advisors have "absolute immunity" from being subpoenaed to testify in the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. [31] [32] [33]
On September 9, 2020, President Donald Trump identified Engel among a list of potential future nominees to the Supreme Court. [34]
In January 2021, after then-President Donald Trump's re-election bid failed, Trump undertook a number of unprecedented acts to overturn the 2020 election, including a pressure campaign to request the Justice Department to falsely claim fraud and invalidate the results of the election in key battleground states. Engel, along with Richard Donoghue and others, refused to carry out the scheme and reportedly threatened to resign if he replaced acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark in an effort to overturn the election. [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] On June 23, 2022, Engel testified in the fifth public hearing of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.
In May 2021, Dechert LLP announced that Engel had rejoined their law firm as a partner. [41] [42] [43]
Engel married Susan Kearns in 2004. They met while working as co-clerks to Judge Kozinski, and both served as clerks on the Supreme Court during the 2001 term, with Kearns clerking for Justice Antonin Scalia. [44]
The United States attorney general (AG) is the head of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and is the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government of the United States. The attorney general serves as the principal advisor to the president of the United States on all legal matters. The attorney general is a statutory member of the Cabinet of the United States.
Merrick Brian Garland is an American lawyer and jurist who has served as the 86th United States attorney general since 2021. He previously served as a circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 2021. In 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Republican-led U.S. Senate did not hold a vote to confirm him.
John Choon Yoo is a South Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Yoo became known for his legal opinions concerning executive power, warrantless wiretapping, and the Geneva Conventions while serving in the George W. Bush administration, during which he was the author of the controversial "Torture Memos" in the War on Terror.
The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is an office in the United States Department of Justice that supports the attorney general in their role as legal adviser to the president and all executive branch agencies. It drafts legal opinions of the attorney general and provides its own written opinions and other advice in response to requests from the counsel to the president, the various agencies of the executive branch, and other components of the Department of Justice. The office reviews and comments on the constitutionality of pending legislation. The office reviews any executive orders and substantive proclamations for legality if the president proposes them. All proposed orders of the attorney general and regulations that require the attorney general's approval are reviewed. It also performs a variety of special assignments referred by the attorney general or the deputy attorney general.
William Pelham Barr is an American attorney who served as United States attorney general in the administration of President George H. W. Bush from 1991 to 1993 and again in the administration of President Donald Trump from 2019 to 2020.
Daniel Bernard Levin served as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Justice Department from July 2004 until February 2005. He is notable for having upheld legal opinions during the Bush administration that narrowly defined torture and authorized enhanced interrogation techniques. These opinions were mostly secret during this period, but rumors of abuse of prisoners were widespread, particularly after the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner torture and abuse scandal in Iraq. These opinions were repudiated in 2009 by the Obama administration.
Steven Gill Bradbury is an American lawyer and government official who served as the General Counsel of the United States Department of Transportation. He previously served as Acting Assistant Attorney General from 2005 to 2007 and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General from 2004 to 2009, heading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the U.S. Department of Justice during President George W. Bush's second term.
Edward Casey O'Callaghan is an American attorney and former U.S. Department of Justice official.
Dawn Elizabeth Johnsen is an American lawyer and the Walter W. Foskett Professor of Constitutional law, on the faculty at Maurer School of Law at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. She previously served in the Biden administration as Acting Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel, having been appointed on January 20, 2021, by President Joe Biden, to return to the role she previously held in the Clinton administration. She was succeeded in that role in a permanent capacity by Christopher H. Schroeder, and is currently serving as the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the same office.
A set of legal memoranda known as the "Torture Memos" were drafted by John Yoo as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States and signed in August 2002 by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice. They advised the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Department of Defense, and the President on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques—mental and physical torment and coercion such as prolonged sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and waterboarding—and stated that such acts, widely regarded as torture, might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority during the "War on Terror".
Jeffrey Adam Rosen is an American lawyer who served as acting United States attorney general from December 2020 to January 2021 and as United States deputy attorney general from 2019 to 2020. Before joining the Department of Justice, he was a senior partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and was the United States deputy secretary of transportation.
Curtis E. Gannon is an American lawyer. He is a Deputy Solicitor General, a career position, in the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States. He previously served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice. He was appointed to this position on January 20, 2017, by President Donald Trump.
The Robert Mueller special counsel investigation was an investigation into 45th U.S. president Donald Trump regarding Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and was conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller from May 2017 to March 2019. It was also called the Russia investigation, Mueller probe, and Mueller investigation. The investigation focused on three points:
Jeffrey Bossert Clark is an American lawyer who was Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division from 2018 to 2021. In September 2020, he was also appointed acting head of the Civil Division. In 2020 and 2021, Clark allegedly helped then-president Donald Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Clark's actions in that endeavor were reviewed by the District of Columbia Bar – the entity authorized by law to pursue attorney discipline and disbarment in the District of Columbia – which recommended discipline to the DC Court of Appeals in July 2022, and in August 2024 its Board on Professional Responsibility recommended a two year suspension of his law license. He was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal prosecution of Donald Trump over attempts to overturn the 2020 election. On August 14, 2023, he was indicted along with 18 other people in the prosecution related to the 2020 election in Georgia.
John Franklin Bash III is an American attorney who served as the United States Attorney for the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas from 2017 to 2020.
The Barr letter is a four-page letter sent on March 24, 2019, from Attorney General William Barr to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees purportedly detailing the "principal conclusions" of the Mueller report of the Special Counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election, allegations of conspiracy or coordination between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia, and allegations of obstruction of justice.
The Mueller report, officially titled Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, is the official report documenting the findings and conclusions of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election, allegations of conspiracy or coordination between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia, and allegations of obstruction of justice. The report was submitted to Attorney General William Barr on March 22, 2019, and a redacted version of the 448-page report was publicly released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on April 18, 2019. It is divided into two volumes. The redactions from the report and its supporting material were placed under a temporary "protective assertion" of executive privilege by then-President Trump on May 8, 2019, preventing the material from being passed to Congress, despite earlier reassurance by Barr that Trump would not exert privilege.
This is a timeline of events from 2020 to 2022 related to investigations into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, both before and after July 2016, until November 8, 2016, election day, the transition, the first and second halves of 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and the first and second halves of 2019.
The United States Department of Justice under the Trump administration acquired by a February 2018 subpoena the Apple iCloud metadata of two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, several others associated with the committee, and some of their family members. The subpoena covered 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses since the inception of the accounts. Seizing communications information of members of Congress is extraordinarily rare. The department also subpoenaed and obtained 2017 and 2018 phone log and email metadata from news reporters for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Apple also received and complied with February 2018 subpoenas for the iCloud accounts of White House counsel Don McGahn and his wife. Microsoft received a subpoena relating to a personal email account of a congressional staff member in 2017.
'The court's ... review of the memorandum revealed that the Department in fact never considered bringing a charge,' the panel wrote in its opinion. 'Instead, the memorandum concerned a separate decision that had gone entirely unmentioned by the government in its submissions to the court — what, if anything, to say to Congress and the public about the Mueller Report.' The panel added: 'We affirm the district court.'
DOJ officials previously told the court that the memo should be kept from the public because it involved internal department deliberations and the advice given to Barr about whether Trump should face prosecution. But a district judge ruled that Barr was never engaged in such a process and had already made up his mind to not charge Trump.
Srinivasan said the memo, co-authored by Assistant Attorney General for Legal Counsel Steven Engel and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Edward O'Callaghan, seemed more like a "thought experiment" because Barr decided before the memo was written that Trump would not be charged with a crime.
In her order, Jackson noted that the memo prepared for Barr, and the letter from Barr to Congress that describes the special counsel's report, are 'being written by the very same people at the very same time. The emails show not only that the authors and the recipients of the memorandum are working hand in hand to craft the advice that is supposedly being delivered by OLC, but that the letter to Congress is the priority, and it is getting completed first,' the judge wrote.