Monkeysee Monkey Do

Michael B. Mukasey , who I will now officially call Michael Monkeysee, born 1941, was a lawyer who, for 18 years, served as a judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, six of those years as Chief Judge.

On September 17, 2007, president bush nominated Monkeysee to serve as the 81st Attorney General of the United States, after Alberto Gonzales was unceremoniously showed the door.

Monkeysee attended Columbia, receiving his B.A. in 1963, and Yale Law School, receiving his LL.B. in 1967. He practiced law for 20 years in New York City, serving for four years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the federal prosecutor's office in which he worked with Rudolph Giuliani. In 1976, he joined the New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, to which he returned after retirement from the U.S. District Court.

Monkeysee swore in Mayor-elect Giuliani in 1994 and 1998.

Monkeysee’s son, Marc L. Monkeysee, leads the white-collar criminal defense practice in the New York office of Bracewell & Giuliani.

The Monkeysee’s are justice advisers to Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.
In 1987, Monkeysee was nominated as a federal district judge in Manhattan by President Ronald Reagan; he took the bench in 1988. He served in that position for 18 years, including a tenure as Chief Judge of the Southern District of New York from 2000 to July 2006.

During his tenure on the bench, Monkeysee presided over the criminal prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman and El Sayyid Nosair, whom he sentenced to life in prison for a plot to blow up the United Nations and other Manhattan landmarks uncovered during an investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

During that case, Monkeysee spoke out against leaks by law enforcement officials regarding the facts of the case allegedly aimed at prejudicing potential jurors against the defendants.
Monkeysee also heard the trial of Jose Padilla, ruling that the U.S. citizen and alleged terrorist could be held as an enemy combatant, but was entitled to see his lawyers. Mukasey also was the judge in the litigation between developer Larry Silverstein and several insurance companies arising from the destruction of the World Trade Center.

In May 2004, while still a member of the judiciary, Judge Monkeysee delivered a speech (which he converted into a Wall Street Journal opinion piece) that defended the Patriot Act; the piece also doubted that the FBI engaged in racial profiling of Arabs and criticized the American Library Association for condemning the Patriot Act but not taking a position on librarians imprisoned in Cuba.

On September 16, 2007, various publications reported that Monkeysee accepted bush's offer to replace Alberto Gonzales as the Attorney General. He was officially nominated by the president on September 17. At his nomination press conference with the president, Monkeysee stated, "
The task of helping to protect our security, which the Justice Department shares with the rest of our government, is not the only task before us. The Justice Department must also protect the safety of our children, the commerce that assures our prosperity, and the rights and liberties that define us as a nation."

I personally think his ties with Giuliani should be highly suspect and should disqualify him from holding an office as important as the Attorney Generals office.

Especially now, when Giuliani is a presidential candidate.

Besides, the fact that bush endorses him which has proven over the last near seven years to be the kiss of death for anyone’s political career.