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Michael Chertoff (born 28 November 1953) is a United States Court of Appeals judge and former federal prosecutor, and assistant U.S. Attorney General. He was nominated by President George W. Bush on January 11, 2005 to succeed Tom Ridge as Secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security.
Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a rabbi, Chertoff attended Harvard University, graduating in 1975. He then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1978, going on to clerk for appellate judge Murray Griffin for a year before clerking for United States Supreme Court justice William Brennan from 1979 to 1980. He worked in private practice with Latham & Watkins from 1980 to 1983 before being hired as a prosecutor by Rudolph Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, working on mafia and political corruption-related cases.
In 1987, Chertoff joined the office of the U.S. Attorney for the state of New Jersey; he was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 as United States Attorney for the state in 1990. Chertoff was asked to stay in his position even as the Clinton administration took office in 1993, at the request of Democratic Senator Bill Bradley; he was the only U.S. attorney not replaced in that partisan shift. Chertoff stayed with the U.S. Attorney's office until 1994, when he entered private practice, returning to Latham & Watkins as a partner.
Despite his friendly relationship with some Democrats, during the Whitewater investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Chertoff was special counsel for the Senate committee studying allegations against the Clintons. When Chertoff faced Senate confirmation in 2003 for a federal judgeship, Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a Senator from New York, cast the lone dissenting vote against Chertoff's confirmation, explaining that her vote was in protest of the way junior White House staffers were "very badly treated" by Chernoff's staff during the Whitewater investigation.
In 2000, Chertoff worked as special counsel to the New Jersey State Senate Judiciary Committee, investigating racial profiling in New Jersey. He also did some fundraising for George W. Bush and other Republicans during the 2000 election cycle and advised Bush's presidential campaign on criminal justice issues. From 2001 to 2003, he headed the criminal division of the Department of Justice, leading the prosecutions case against terrorist suspect Zacarias Moussaoui and against accounting firm Arthur Andersen for destroying documents relating to the Enron collapse. There, he came under fire as one of the chief artitects of Bush administration legal strategies in the War on Terror, particularly with regards to the detainment without evidence of thousands of immigrants of Middle-Eastern descent. Chertoff was appointed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia by George W. Bush on March 5, 2003, and was confirmed by the Senate 88-1 on June 9.
Having previously been approved for the posts of U.S. attorney, assistant attorney general, and federal judge, Chertoff will have his fourth round of Senate confirmation hearings, this time for the Homeland Security post.
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