Burkhalter Stepping in as Interim U.S. Attorney

Courtesy U.S. Department of Justice

by Adam Lynch
October 23, 2009

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder picked federal prosecutor Don Burkhalter to serve as interim United States Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi today. Burkhalter, who served as No. 2 under former U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott during the Clinton administration, will replace Stan Harris, who had been serving as acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi since the departure of Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton.

Lampton left the post just prior to the swearing in of then president-elect Barack Obama. Harris, formerly Lampton's first assistant U.S. Attorney, had been serving since Lampton's January retirement.

Burkhalter is a veteran of the U.S. Department of Justice, having served more than a decade in Washington and two decades in Jackson.

"He did a great job," said Pigott of his former co-worker. "He grew up in Pike County and went to Tulane (University) and has been with the Department of Justice most of his professional life. He's a very seasoned prosecutor. He's got the broadest experience of anybody in office."

Burkhalter was the presiding attorney under Lampton, who oversaw the guilty plea of Jennifer Diaz, wife of former Mississippi Supreme Court Judge Oliver Diaz. Jennifer Diaz pled guilty in 2006 for tax evasion in U.S. District Court. Burkhalter had argued that the Diazes did not repay loans backed by Mississippi attorneys Richard Scruggs and Paul Minor, but had not initially counted the gifts as income.

A jury found Oliver Diaz innocent of tax evasion. The former judge told the Jackson Free Press that the money was reflected in later tax returns, and that prosecutors pressured his wife to plead guilty in order to stave off the possibility of prison time for both herself and her husband (thus depriving their children of parents). Diaz also referenced the fact that Lampton's tax evasion charges arrived directly on the heels of the prosecutor's failure to successfully convict Diaz of corruption in 2005.

Minor, who is appealing a 2007 conviction for corruption, described Lampton's dogged prosecution of him and Diaz as a political witch hunt assembled by the justice department under President George W. Bush and Chief of Staff Karl Rove to kill funding for the Democratic Party, which benefits from donations of pro-plaintiff attorneys like Paul Minor.

Pigott did not describe Burkhalter as a political person and believed that he may not take easily to the head position, despite his remarkable experience.

"He's a career prosecutor, and I doubt he'd be interested in a presidential appointment, but I don't know. I know he did a superb job as the top administrator and the No. 2 person when I was U.S. attorney in the Clinton administration," Pigott said.

The Department of Justice could not say when Obama will name permanent U.S. attorneys for Mississippi's northern and southern districts.