Take it from the lawyer who squared off against her in her most high-profile case as a prosecutor: Loretta Lynch will emerge unscathed from her confirmation hearings to become the 83rd attorney general of the United States of America.
“I think she’ll ace the hearing, and I think she’ll have absolutely no problem convincing the United States Senate that she’ll be a great attorney,” said lawyer Marvyn Kornberg on Tuesday.
Kornberg, 70, defended New York City police officer Justin Volpe in a landmark 1999 trial, on charges that Volpe had sodomized a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, with a broomstick inside a Brooklyn precinct bathroom. Volpe was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.
The woman who led the team that put Volpe behind bars was Loretta Lynch.
Lynch, currently the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, is scheduled to begin two days of testimony on Wednesday before the senate judiciary committee to replace outgoing attorney general Eric Holder. If confirmed, Lynch would become the country’s first African-American woman to serve as attorney general, and the first justice department head in modern times to have ascended directly from a district attorney’s office.
Lynch, 55, has been acing things her whole life. Born between two brothers in Greensboro, North Carolina, to a Baptist minister and a librarian mother, she was valedictorian of her high-school class – an honor the school asked her to split with two other students, because it had never celebrated a lone black valedictorian before, according to a story she occasionally shares.
She left North Carolina to enroll at Harvard, where she graduated cum laude. After graduation, Lynch worked as a legal associate at the top-shelf Manhattan firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel for six years, before taking a job as prosecutor in New York’s Eastern District, which includes Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island.
In the early years of her career, “I would go out to take depositions and be mistaken for the court reporter all the time,” she told the Network Journal in 2007.
President Bill Clinton appointed Lynch US attorney in 1999. In 2010, after a second stint in private practice, she was re-appointed to the post, this time by Barack Obama. Lynch was confirmed both times by a voice vote in the Senate.
It was during her time as a prosecutor that Lynch built a reputation for no-nonsense efficiency that is a palpable part of her appeal for a Democratic White House facing two years of life with a Republican congressional majority. Despite being an Obama appointee, Lynch is not part of the president’s inner circle and may not, for that reason, be immediately seen by Republicans as a proxy inviting attack. Lynch “doesn’t look to make headlines; she looks to make a difference”, Obama said at a White House ceremony to announce her nomination.
“A low-key, measured kind of personality is the way I would describe her,” Alan Vinegrad, a fellow prosecutor on the Louima case, told the Wall Street Journal last summer, before the attorney general pick was announced. “She’s really smart, has a winning personality and she’s very charming. But she can be very tough when she needs to be, especially in the courtroom.”
Lynch, who is married with two stepchildren, also has served as a prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 2005 and was appointed by Holder in 2010 to the attorney general’s advisory committee, which she chairs.
As a private lawyer, Lynch’s work ran to commercial litigation, white-collar criminal defense and corporate compliance issues. But in her role as district attorney in New York City, she has overseen the prosecution of terrorism, public corruption, cyber-crime and organized crime cases.
Lynch brought 20 felony corruption charges against Michael Grimm, the former New York congressman who won re-election last November and then pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud. And she is leading an investigation into bringing possible civil rights charges in the death of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died last July after being placed in a police chokehold.
If she is confirmed as attorney general, Lynch is likely to handle other cases involving policing, race and civil rights, including an ongoing federal investigation opened by Holder after the killing last August of Michael Brown, of Ferguson, Missouri, by a police officer.
“I don’t think she’ll be afraid to bring any police investigation case,” said Kornberg. “Nor do I think she’ll be afraid to get up there and say, ‘this is not a case for the US attorney’s office’.”
Recalling the Louima case, Kornberg said “it turned the city in turmoil”.
“It probably made [the Reverend Al] Sharpton half of what he is today,” Kornberg said. “It was a situation where the criminal charge was horrendous, and we just had to do what we had to do.”
Kornberg said he did not really know who Lynch was when met her at trial. But, 16 years later, he is “not in the least” surprised that she is on the cusp of becoming America’s top law enforcement officer.
“She’s fair and knowledgeable,” Kornberg said. “She just does her job – and she does her job the right way.
“She’s a most able attorney, and she’ll be a credit to the office.”
