CNN reports that President Obama is “expected to nominate Loretta Lynch,” the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, to serve as the next Attorney General of the United States. If confirmed, Lynch will be the first African American woman to lead the Justice Department.
Much of Lynch’s appeal to Obama may stem from the fact that she is removed from many of the political battles that would render a nominee who has often been at odds with Republicans unconfirmable in a GOP-controlled Senate. Lynch has a distinguished, but relatively apolitical, career as a prosecutor. After earning both her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard, Lynch was an associate at a large law firm before joining the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York in 1990. There, she rose to hold several senior career roles, including Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney from 1998 to 1999, when she was confirmed to lead the office at U.S. Attorney during the Clinton Administration. Shortly after President Clinton left office, Lynch became a partner at another large law firm until President Obama reappointed her as U.S. Attorney in 2009.
Yet, while Lynch’s career has kept her more distant from Washington, DC’s increasingly contentious politics, she is not entirely removed from them. Lynch’s office is currently prosecuting Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), a former FBI agent charged with 20 counts of fraud, perjury and other alleged crimes related to allegations that he hid more than $1 million in gross receipts while he ran a New York restaurant.
Lynch’s biography resembles that of the current attorney general, Eric Holder, in at least two respects. Like Lynch, Holder spent many years as a prosecutor before his nomination to the Justice Department’s top job. Holder also frequently functioned as the Obama Administration’s truth-teller on issues of race, often speaking eloquently about his personal encounters with racism. “I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man,” Holder told an audience in Ferguson, Missouri shortly after the racially charged police shooting of Michael Brown, before he recounted a time when he believes he was racially profiled while walking in an affluent neighborhood in Washington, DC. After the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Holder recounted that the incident “caused me to sit down to have a conversation with my own 15 year old son, like my dad did with me” about “how as a young black man I should interact with the police.”
It remains to be seen whether Lynch will take on a similar truth-telling role should she be confirmed to lead the Justice Department, but there is little question that she will have stories to tell about her own experiences with racism should she choose to do so. Lynch was born in Greenboro, NC a year before a series of lunch counter sit-ins in that town helped trigger a wave of similar protests across the country.
Lynch also has personal experience confronting police brutality and other abusive behaviors by police. In 1997, a police officer sodomized a handcuffed Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima with a broken broomstick in the bathroom of a police station. Louima suffered a ruptured colon and bladder from this incident, and he spent two months in the hospital. According to one witness, the cop bragged to other officers about how he had tortured Louima, at one point pointing the stick that he inserted in Louima’s rectum at another police officer’s face and saying “Smell this. Smell this.”
The case quickly became a national symbol of police brutality generally, and of brutality against the African American community in particular. Lynch, who was then a senior career prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office that she currently leads, supervised the successful prosecution of the officer who assaulted Louima. The officer was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Should she be confirmed, Lynch will take over a Justice Department that, under the leadership of Attorney General Holder, has confronted police misconduct on a much grander scale. Under Holder, the Justice Department doubled its investigations into police departments, uncovering numerous examples of policy brutality, abuse of people with mental illnesses and excessive use of deadly force.