8 U.S. attorney picks would include historic firsts

WASHINGTON — President Biden is nominating eight new leaders for U.S. attorney positions across the country, including in the office overseeing the prosecutions of hundreds of defendants charged in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

The nominees announced by the White House on Monday come as the Justice Department is continuing to round out its leadership team under Attorney General Merrick Garland, who traveled to Chicago last week to announce an initiative to crack down on gun trafficking corridors. The Justice Department’s 93 U.S. attorneys, who are responsible for federal criminal prosecutions in their respective districts, are likely to be central to efforts to combat violent crime. If confirmed by the Senate, the nominees would run offices in the District of Columbia, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Washington state. Most would be historic firsts, including the first Black or female attorneys to lead their districts, the Biden administration said.

The nominees include Matthew Graves, a former fraud and public corruption prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia; Rachael Rollins, the district attorney in Suffolk County, Mass.; Erek Barron, a former federal prosecutor and policy adviser to Biden and a Maryland lawmaker; Zachary Myers, who specializes in national security and cyber matters as a federal prosecutor in Maryland and who would serve in the Southern District of Indiana; Clifford Johnson, who would lead the Northern District of Indiana; Justice Department environmental lawyer Vanessa Waldref would run the Eastern District of Washington; and Nicholas Brown, who has been a federal prosecutor and general counsel to the governor, would run the Western District of Washington.