By Nate Raymond and Andrew Goudsward
(Reuters) -The federal judge in Virginia assigned to hear former FBI Director James Comey’s criminal case is an ex-public defender who advocated for sentencing reform and was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.
U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff in Alexandria, Virginia, was assigned to the case late on Thursday after Comey was indicted as Trump pursues a retribution campaign against his political enemies.
Comey is slated to make his first appearance before Nachmanoff on October 9, when he is arraigned on charges that he made false statements and obstructed a congressional proceeding.
The indictment alleges that Comey misled Congress by falsely testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 that he had not authorized anyone else to be an anonymous source in news reporting about an FBI investigation.
Prosecutors say Comey faces a maximum of five years in prison if convicted. Comey on Thursday said he had “great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I’m innocent.”
JUDGE IN COMEY CASE WAS APPOINTED BY BIDEN
Cases are assigned to judges randomly. Trump on social media on Friday lashed out about the case landing before Nachmanoff, saying it was “just assigned a Crooked Joe Biden appointed Judge, so he’s off to a very good start.”
Nachmanoff’s court did not respond to a request for comment.
Nachmanoff, who was born in Washington, D.C., in 1968, is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and has spent nearly his entire legal career working as a lawyer and judge in Virginia.
He was nominated by Biden to serve as a life-tenured federal district court judge in 2021, after serving as a magistrate judge since 2015 and before that as a federal public defender, representing indigent criminal defendants for about 13 years.
The Senate confirmed Nachmanoff in a 52-46 vote, with three Republicans joining the chamber’s then-Democratic majority to support him.
Biden made a priority of increasing the number of public defenders on the federal bench, which had long been dominated by ex-prosecutors and former law firm partners, and appointed more than 45 to the bench by the time he left office, a record for a president.
As a public defender, Nachmanoff advocated against mandatory minimum sentences. In a 2009 article he co-wrote, he said the policy “inevitably results in disproportionately harsh punishments and unwarranted disparity.”
He argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007, securing a 7-2 ruling that judges have the discretion to depart from federal sentencing guidelines and impose lower sentences in cases involving crack-cocaine convictions.
That case concerned sentencing disparities for charges involving crack versus powder cocaine that led to the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans. Nachmanoff at an American Bar Association event in 2015 called it “one of the most pernicious and corrosive examples of unfairness in our criminal justice system.”
As a magistrate judge, Nachmanoff presided over the arraignment in 2019 of two associates of Trump’s then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were charged with campaign finance violations. He released them on $1 million bonds.
As a district court judge, he sentenced a former health care worker to two years in prison in November after he was convicted of illegally accessing former liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s medical records before she died in 2020.
In May, Nachmanoff sided with the Trump administration and cleared the way for the Central Intelligence Agency to fire its top doctor, whom some Trump supporters had criticized for her past work on COVID-19 vaccination policy for the military.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Nick Zieminski)
