Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey reached outside Washington in selecting a prosecutor to investigate the controversial firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006.
But while Nora R. Dannehy may not be well known inside the Beltway, she has established a reputation in Connecticut as a tenacious prosecutor, someone who can take on high profile and politically charged cases and wins.
A Harvard Law School graduate, Dannehy, 47, is currently serving as the acting U.S. attorney in the Connecticut district. She’s been a federal prosecutor there since 1991.
In 2004, Dannehy led the prosecution of then Gov. John G. Rowland, a Republican. He resigned from office and pleaded guilty to conspiracy, admitting he illegally took gifts and services.
In the previous year, Dannehy prosecuted Paul J. Silvester, then Connecticut’s treasurer. He pleaded guilty to accepting kickbacks.
Noreen Malone notes in Slate that, in her new role, Dannehy technically won’t have the titles of “special prosecutor” or “independent counsel” because she comes from within the Department of Justice and ultimately reports to Mukasey.
However, the department has stated that she has the authority to go in any direction her investigation leads her.
Dannehy’s appointment came after the release of a scathing report on the dismissal of the nine U.S. attorneys.
The report was prepared under the guidance of Glenn A. Fine, the Department of Justice’s inspector general, and H. Marshall Jarrett, who heads the Office of Professional Responsibility at the department.
Fine and Jarrett concluded, “The process the Department used to select the U.S. Attorneys for removal was fundamentally flawed.”
And they singled out then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty for failing to “adequately supervise” the process.
Fine and Jarrett also “found significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor in the removal of several of the U.S. attorneys.”
They ended by noting that their report has gaps because several White House officials, including Karl Rove, the former deputy chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, refused to be interviewed by investigators.
Dannehy has 60 days to submit a preliminary report to Mukasey.
Presumably, she may meet some of the same roadblocks that Fine and Jarrett met, but those who knew her in Connecticut say that she will be hard to divert.
“No one will outwork her. No one is going to be smarter than her,” Mike Clark, a retired FBI agent who investigated Rowland, told the Associated Press.
Dannehy grew up in the law, as her father, the late Joseph Dannehy, was a judge in Connecticut for nearly 40 years, retiring as a justice on Connecticut’s Supreme Court.
Her brother Michael Dannehy is a Superior Court judge in Connecticut. Her husband, Leonard C. Boyle, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut, is head of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center in Washington.
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