Magistrate Judge in SDFLA

Even though everyone was focused on the new U.S. Attorney and judge positions, there is also an opening for magistrate judge in the Southern District of Florida.  Applications were due March 19.  I don't have the list of the 49 people who applied, so if someone has it, please forward it.  Your identity will be kept secret.  As always, thanks to all of my sources over the years... Since this blog started back in 2005, no source has ever been revealed.

Meantime, Tony Gonzalez is the acting U.S. Attorney.  The outgoing U.S. Attorney Ariana Fajardo issued this statement.  Rumpole didn't like it. 

Jay Weaver covers her departure here.  From The Herald:

Barely on the job as the new U.S. attorney in Miami, Ariana Fajardo Orshan confronted her first crisis in the fall of 2018 — a sensational terrorism investigation of a homeless man who was sending crudely made pipe bombs in the mail from South Florida to politicians in the Northeast.
Her office, along with the FBI, jumped all over it. But as the probe generated national headlines, she received back-to-back phone calls from the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and the deputy attorney general in Washington, D.C.
“Stand down,” they both told her, the case would be prosecuted by the Southern District of New York, aka the “sovereign district” because of its long tradition of power and independence among the 94 U.S. attorney’s offices in the country.
“They grabbed the case,” Fajardo told the Miami Herald Wednesday. She was nominated by President Donald Trump, became the first woman to serve as U.S. attorney in Miami, and is now leaving office Friday following Trump’s defeat to Democrat Joe Biden in November. Like other top federal prosecutors nationwide, Fajardo, 48, must step down as part of the transition in presidential power.
For Fajardo, a former Miami-Dade circuit judge and assistant state prosecutor, the New York power play was an immediate “sore spot” for the federal newcomer. She argued that the perpetrator was local and mail bombs were all made here, so the case belonged in South Florida, but the Southern District of New York outmaneuvered her by opening a grand jury first to make the terrorism case. Some of the mail bombs were received by former President Barack Obama and other politicians in D.C., New York and elsewhere.
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Fajardo, who was raised in a Cuban family in Hialeah, handpicked a dozen women and men who were Hispanic, Black, Asian, Indian and white to fill executive and supervisory positions. “I knew I wanted a greater representation in our office that reflected the community,” she said.
Fajardo, who acknowledged she doesn’t like meetings, collaborated with Gonzalez, a techie type, and other advisors to develop a methodical system of hiring new assistant U.S. attorneys — going beyond tapping only the best students from the nation’s top law schools and federal clerkships.
Her team recruited civil and criminal lawyers with trial experience in either law firms or the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, hiring more than 90 new prosecutors over the past two years. Among the new hires: two Haitian Americans, which, though a small number, was significant because of their lack of presence in the office. Fajardo also recruited candidates from the conservative legal group known as the Federalist Society. It gained tremendous influence during the Trump administration.