Vanita Gupta confirmed as associate AG
The Senate voted to confirm Vanita Gupta as associate attorney general Wednesday, making her the first civil rights lawyer or woman of color to serve as the Justice Department’s No. 3 official.
Gupta will oversee the department’s vast civil division, which is tasked with defending the Biden administration in court, as well as its antitrust, tax, and environment and natural resources divisions. She will also oversee the Civil Rights Division at a time when the Biden administration has vowed to use every tool at its disposal to combat systemic racism.
Gupta was confirmed 51-49, largely along party lines. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, RAlaska, broke with her party after groups representing Alaska Native women, survivors of domestic violence and other communities said they supported Gupta’s nomination.
“I was impressed not only with her passion that she carries but the work that she performs,” Murkowski said on the Senate floor. She added that, while some of Gupta’s previous public statements troubled her, she would “give the benefit of the doubt to a woman who I believe has demonstrated through her professional career to be committed to matters of political justice.”
Once Gupta is sworn in this week, the Justice Department’s top three officials will be in place. Lisa O. Monaco was sworn in Wednesday as deputy attorney general, a day after the Senate confirmed her.
Gupta, 46, rose to national prominence soon after she graduated from New York University’s School of Law in 2001. She began working at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she investigated a series of arrests and drug-related convictions of dozens of men, almost all of them Black, in Tulia, Texas.
Gupta proved the drug charges had been fabricated by a narcotics agent named Tom Coleman, who was found guilty of perjury. In 2003, Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, pardoned 35 people as a result of that case.