Nominees Selected For U.S. Attorney In Indiana

Marilyn Odendahl for www.theindianalawyer.com

In its latest round of nominations for U.S. attorney candidates announced today, the White House has tapped the current interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern Indiana District and a litigator based in Chicago for the Northern District of Indiana.

Joshua Minkler, who has served as the interim U.S. Attorney in the Southern District since June 2015, has been nominated to fill the position. Prior to becoming the interim, he served for 21 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in the same office where he held the positions of first assistant U.S. attorney and chief of the Drug and Violent Crime Unit.

Thomas Kirsch II, partner at Winston & Strawn LLP, has been nominated to be U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana.  He clerked for Judge John Tinder when he was a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, and he served as assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Indiana as well as counsel to the assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy.

Minkler received his bachelor’s degree from Wabash College and his J.D. from Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Kirsch received his bachelor’s degree from Indiana University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.

This is the third round of nominations for the chief federal law enforcement officers in judicial districts around the country. A total of six candidates were presented in this wave for vacancies in Iowa, Missouri Illinois and North Carolina as well as Indiana.

Yesterday, the White House nominated 11 to fill vacancies on the district courts but none were named for the open seats in Indiana.

President Donald Trump announced his picks for federal judgeships in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Oklahoma. The list includes individual candidate for vacancies in the Northern District of Georgia, the Middle District of Tennessee and the Eastern District of North Carolina, all designated as judicial emergencies by the U.S. Courts administration because of the caseloads.

Indiana has two openings in its district courts. The Southern District of Indiana has had a vacancy for 1,110 days since Judge Sarah Evans Barker took senior status in June 2014. That unfilled spot has been identified as a judicial emergency.

In the Northern District of Indiana, a seat has been vacant since Judge Robert Miller Jr. took senior status in January 2016. Another seat will be opening in September when Judge Joseph Van Bokkelen is scheduled to take senior status.

Earlier in the spring, Indiana Sen. Todd Young put out a call for applications for the judicial vacancies as well as the openings in the U.S. Attorney and U.S. Marshal offices in the state. The senator’s office said a number of well-qualified candidates have been interviewed and Young has had conversations about the vacancies with the White House.

Young had no timeline for when the judicial nominees would be announced but said he would like the vacancies filled quickly as possible to avoid a backlog in the courts.

Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, Democrat, has been kept informed about the process, Young’s office said, but the two are not working jointly to select potential nominees.

In May, the White House nominated Notre Dame Law School professor Amy Coney Barrett for the Indiana seat on the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has not had a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

During his final year in office, President Barack Obama nominated Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Indiana Winfield Ong and former Indiana Justice Myra Selby for the Southern Indiana District and 7^th Circuit courts respectively.

Ong received a hearing and was unanimously approved by the judiciary committee on a voice but he never received a vote from the full Senate. Selby, whose nomination was blocked by then-Sen. Dan Coats, was not given a hearing by the committee.