Kash Patel, former Miami APD and AFPD, confirmed as FBI director

1. From NPR:

The Republican-led Senate voted Thursday to confirm Kash Patel as the new FBI director despite questions about whether he has the qualifications and the temperament to lead the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency.

Patel, a close ally of President Trump and a fierce critic of the FBI, was confirmed by a 51-49 vote, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski joining all Democrats in opposing him.


It caps a remarkable rise for Patel, who has worked as a public defender, federal prosecutor and congressional aide before serving as a national security official in President Trump's first term. He later emerged as a fixture in MAGA world, a right-wing podcast regular and a Trump loyalist.

Republicans welcomed his confirmation. They argue that the FBI has unfairly targeted conservatives in recent years, and they see Patel as someone who will fix that purported problem.

"Kash is the right man to clean up the FBI to restore Americans' confidence and trust that the FBI is not a political organization, it is a law enforcement organization," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a post on X.

2.  In other news, Jay Weaver covers Trump's new pick for U.S. Attorney in the SDFLA, Jason Reding Quinones.  The intro:

On paper, President Donald Trump’s new nominee to head the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida seems to have solid credentials.

He formerly served as a federal prosecutor in the Miami office, was appointed as a Miami-Dade County judge a year ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and he’s a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

But there are a couple of things in the background of Jason A. Reding Quiñones that were not highlighted in Trump’s glowing post about him on his media platform, Truth Social, on Sunday, including a name change and that he received poor evaluations as a criminal prosecutor in the same office he has been nominated to head.

You don't see this all that often...

 ...the feds dropped a drug case against a doctor who was previously accused of sex trafficking because of a bad warrant.  Jayne Weintraub was Dr. Jeffrey Kamlet's lawyer.  From the Herald:

Serious mistakes by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office led to the dismissal Tuesday of federal narcotics charges against Dr. Jeffrey Kamlet, a Miami addiction doctor accused of sex trafficking a 17-year-old girl found hiding in his closet with another teenager in 2022. In a court filing last week, Kamlet’s attorney, Jayne Weintraub, seized on several errors made in drafting the search warrants, among them, an obvious “cut and paste” job by the investigator for Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s Human Trafficking Task Force. The dismissal of the federal drug charges is another stunning embarrassment for Rundle, whose office has come under scrutiny after years of sloppy prosecutions that have led to similar dismissals, as well as resignations of top lawyers in her office.

Judge Jason Reding Quiñones nominated to be U.S. Attorney in the SDFLA

It is my honor to nominate Judge Jason Reding Quiñones as the next United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

A former Federal prosecutor and Justice Department National Security Official, Judge Reding Quiñones currently serves as a highly respected State Trial…

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) February 16, 2025

He's an FIU grad, class of 2008. Before that he went to U.F. He's been in the Air Force and in JAG. An AUSA. And a judge. Congrats to Mr. Reding Quinones. For those that know him, please let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Thursday afternoon massacre?

It's the buzz of the criminal defense and DOJ world.

Quick background -- Mayor Eric Adams is indicted in SDNY while Biden is president.

Trump's DOJ orders SDNY to dismiss case.

SDNY, DOJ, and Adams' lawyers meet.

SDNY refuses to dismiss.

Acting U.S. Attorney resigns and writes an 8 page letter.

Emil Bove for DOJ responds in his own 8 page letter.

You can read both letters (worth it!) at this link.

Case gets reassigned to the public integrity unit so they can dismiss the case.

The top prosecutors at public integrity resign.

Lots of local line prosecutors have been emailing and texting about this today.  Post your thoughts in the comments, and feel free to do so anonymously.

Justice Sotomayor speaks in Miami

 Jay Weaver covers it here:

 Sonia Sotomayor may be a household name, but her storied legal career stems largely from feeling comfortable in her own skin. “You have to be true to yourself,” Sotomayor, the nation’s first Hispanic justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, told more than 200 people Tuesday evening during a chat with Knight Foundation President and CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth at the Miami Dade College campus in Little Havana.

“I have never denied my culture or hidden my love for my Spanish roots,” Sotomayor said, highlighting her love for family, salsa and roasted pork. “All of these things are important to me and I take pride in them.”

Judge Tjoflat says it's the Gulf of Mexico

In a footnote from this case:

On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing that “[t]he area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico” be renamed as the “Gulf of America.” Exec. Order No. 14172, 90 Fed. Reg. 8629 (Jan. 20, 2025). Because the statutory schemes pertinent to this appeal explicitly refer to this geographic area as the “Gulf of Mexico,” we continue to use that name.

"US Attorneys Said to Be Told to Justify Keeping Newest Prosecutors"

 That's the headline from this explosive article from Bloomberg's Ben Penn.  I'm told there are at least 20 local probationary prosecutors who may be fired.  From the article:

Justice Department headquarters has given all 93 US attorneys two business days to explain why prosecutors they’ve hired in the past two years who aren’t focused on Trump priorities such as immigration and public safety should be retained, said five people briefed on the situation.

Although the nation’s chief prosecutors haven’t been told exactly how the department will use this information, some are treating it as a weekend assignment to save the jobs of numerous line attorneys and support staff on probationary status who aren’t pursuing cases aligned with the president’s agenda.

US attorneys must provide by Feb. 10 justifications for keeping anyone with less than two years of service who doesn’t work on immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety, said the individuals, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The request came from a senior career official who is herself being kept in the dark about the purpose of the mandate.

Recent hires who don’t fall into those three specified categories would potentially include prosecutors specializing in white collar, civil fraud, and civil rights investigations.

The directive is the latest signal about how the Trump DOJ intends to shrink the size of its workforce. Prior guidance from the federal government’s HR office required agencies to assemble lists of new hires for possible termination and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s day one memos warned employees could face termination over their politicization or disobedience.

In a memo Thursday from the Executive Office for US Attorneys and in a followup call Friday, US attorneys were instructed to identify the probationary status of anyone hired in the past two years and then provide details about their work if they deserve to stay.

Determining when each assistant US attorney surpasses their probationary term—making them tougher to fire—is a complicated exercise. It generally lasts two years into the job, but that can be shorter or longer depending on prior government service, security clearances, and other factors.

Adding to the frustration for the US attorneys is that the senior official tasked with delivering the orders—an EOUSA director appointed by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in October—didn’t know answers to their questions about what would come of the identified employees.

The directive to the field comes a week after Bloomberg Law reported that senior DOJ political appointee Emil Bove asked US attorneys to recruit line prosecutors for assignments to border districts.

On Feb. 5, Bondi, hours after being sworn into office, issued memos to diminish white collar enforcement by redirecting foreign corruption, money laundering, and overseas lobbying transparency prosecutors to focus more narrowly on cartels and transnational crime.

The US attorneys, a mix of holdover Biden appointees, acting career officials, and interim leaders installed by Trump, will now have the next few days to make their case to Justice Department headquarters about retaining prosecutors involved in corporate crime and other fields that weren’t singled out as priorities.

News & Notes

1. Last night was the Federal Bar prom. It was very well attended with federal judges and lawyers, all mingling on an outdoor deck on a beautiful Miami night.

2. Former U.S. Attorneys Bob Martinez and Marcos Jimenez come to the defense of FBI agents in this op-ed in the Miami Herald. From the piece:

Today’s FBI agents, like their fallen colleagues, live and work among us, mostly maintaining a low profile. They send their children to our local schools, raise their families in our communities, and maintain a modest and law-abiding lifestyle. They live like average Americans. Yet, on a daily basis, their jobs are not average. They are the ones that Americans have assigned the responsibility to shield us from terrorism and espionage, from predators targeting children, to ferret out public corruption, to protect us from fraud, from kidnappers, from violent predators. To guard our civil rights. They are located in cities and towns across our country and throughout the world. Their work is essential to a safe and free society. Many Americans are trying to make sense of the current effort to purge potentially thousands of hard-working, dedicated agents from the FBI. What would be the impact of the removal of so many federal law enforcement officers on the safety and security of our nation? Who will want to join the FBI if their employment can be terminated, and their identities exposed to retribution by the very criminals they investigated, whenever a new politician takes over?

3. Congress has tasked the Sentencing Commission with describing extraordinary and compelling reasons that may warrant a sentence reduction. The Commission issued a Policy Statement in 2023 that allows defendants to move for a sentence reduction if they can show that their original sentence is “unusually long.” In issuing that Policy Statement (section 1B1.13(b)(6)) the Commission wanted to clarify that defendants may present—and district courts may consider—nonretroactive changes in law as the basis for concluding that a sentence is “unusually long.”

Judge Ruiz has concluded, in this 40 page order, that district courts cannot apply section 1B1.13(b)(6) of the United States Sentencing Commission’s Policy Statement as a matter of law, because the Commission exceeded their statutory authority in allowing district courts to consider nonretroactive changes in law. The Eleventh Circuit will be weighing in on this issue soon, I'm sure, as district judges on our Court are coming out on different sides of the issue.