U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, the newest member of the federal bench in Alexandria, Virginia, was randomly assigned to preside over the criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey, Politico reported.
The assignment late Thursday immediately put Nachmanoff, a 2021 appointee of former President Joe Biden, at the center of a politically charged case that has already drawn intense national attention.
Comey was indicted Thursday on charges of making a false statement and obstruction related to his testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020.
Nachmanoff, 57, has intersected with President Donald Trump’s orbit before. As a federal magistrate judge, Nachmanoff oversaw the 2019 arraignment of Rudy Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were charged with conspiring to violate campaign finance laws by soliciting foreign contributions.
Nachmanoff released them on $1 million bond. Both were later convicted; Fruman pleaded guilty and served a year in prison, and Parnas was sentenced to 20 months.
More recently, Nachmanoff sided with the CIA in a dispute letting the agency dismiss a Pentagon doctor who had become a target of Trump allies due to her advocacy for mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policies in the military.
Nachmanoff, a longtime defense attorney before joining the judiciary, spent more than a decade as a federal public defender in Virginia. His office represented several notorious defendants, including al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and Somali pirates captured after a 2010 attack on a U.S. Navy vessel.
Nachmanoff also won a landmark Supreme Court case, successfully arguing that judges should have discretion to reduce sentences in cases distorted by mandatory crack-cocaine penalties. In a 7-2 ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg authored the majority opinion in his favor.
The Senate confirmed Nachmanoff to the federal bench in October 2021 on a 52-46 vote, with three Republicans joining Democrats: Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Nachmanoff now faces perhaps his most politically sensitive case yet: overseeing the prosecution of Comey, whose firing as FBI director in 2017 in Trump’s first term helped trigger an investigation into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, a probe that Trump and his supporters called a hoax and resulted in the president’s exoneration.
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