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Articles About David Margolis
David Margolis, a Justice Department Institution, Dies at 76
JULY 15, 2016
David Margolis this year in his Justice Department office.
Credit Lonnie Tague/U.S. Department of Justice
WASHINGTON — David Margolis, a brash and revered prosecutor who in more than 50 years at the Justice Department helped it navigate through some of its most difficult chapters, died on Tuesday in Falls Church, Va. He was 76.
The cause was heart-related illness, the Justice Department said.
Mr. Margolis was regarded inside the Justice Department as an all-knowing, Yoda-like figure. He started in 1965 as a longhaired, rumpled federal prosecutor in the Johnson administration and rose to become the department’s top career official as a consigliere and disciplinarian for both Democratic and Republican attorneys general in nine presidential administrations.
He was “a consummate public servant,” Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said in announcing his death.
Inside the buttoned-up confines of the department, he was almost as famous for his gaudy attire and barbed wit as for his sharp legal mind. Mr. Margolis, who wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll disc jockey as a child, favored loud ties, brightly colored leisure suits (not infrequently stained with food), bell-bottom jeans and big brass belt buckles. His office was a proud mess of Yankee baseball memorabilia, comic-book magnets and an Elvis clock strewn among sensitive legal filings and photos of him with political leaders.
In recent decades he was in the middle of many of the Justice Department’s biggest mobster, political corruption, espionage and terrorism investigations. He often examined high-level cases in which the government’s own conduct was called into question, including the suicide of the Clinton White House aide Vince Foster in 1993, the leaking of the C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame’s name in 2003, and the botched corruption prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska in 2008.
In perhaps his biggest test, he intervened in 2010 in a furious long-running dispute over the legal basis for the brutal interrogation tactics used by the C.I.A. against terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Justice Department’s ethics lawyers had concluded that John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, two of the department lawyers responsible for legal opinions authorizing brutal tactics like waterboarding, demonstrated “professional misconduct” and should be sanctioned.
Mr. Margolis with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch.
Credit Lonnie Tague/U.S. Department of Justice
But Mr. Margolis overruled that decision and concluded that their legal memos authorizing the tactics, while flawed, were tempered by the “context” of the frenzied period when they were written.
Criticized by some Democrats for going too easy on the lawyers, Mr. Margolis said later that he agonized over that decision more than any other he had made.
Over his career he earned some of the federal government’s most prestigious awards. In a statement, Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates called him “the go-to guy for department leaders for over 50 years.”
David Margolis was born on Dec. 18, 1939, in Hartford. Discouraging his early aspiration to become a D.J., his father, a local politician, urged him to become a lawyer instead. He received an undergraduate degree from Brown and a law degree from Harvard.
His survivors include his wife, Deborah; his daughters, Kim and Cheryl Margolis; a brother, Charles; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Margolis began his career in the United States attorney’s office in Hartford in 1965 and got his first taste of Justice Department celebrity four years later when he personally negotiated the surrender of an armed bank robbery suspect. One police officer at the scene said he mistook Mr. Margolis, with his long sideburns and “modish clothes,” for a draft card-burning hippie.
Not long after, he moved to the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington to prosecute organized crime cases. He eventually became the senior career employee in advising the attorney general and other political appointees who set policy and oversee the department.
At a ceremony in 2005 observing Mr. Margolis’s 40th anniversary at the Justice Department, James B. Comey Jr., who was then the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Margolis would tell off anybody he thought was wrong, including the attorney general.
Mr. Comey, who is now the director of the F.B.I., was again part of a ceremony honoring Mr. Margolis last year, this time on the occasion of 50 years at the department. Mr. Comey roasted Mr. Margolis’s fashion sense by wearing a loud orange tie with a mismatched, untucked purple shirt.
“David Margolis was the United States Department of Justice,” Mr. Comey said in a statement after his passing.
His dry witticisms were so memorable that The Washington Post cataloged some of them last year. At one congressional hearing at which he testified, a lawmaker asked how many people work at the Justice Department. “About 60 percent,” he answered.
Mr. Margolis, known early in his career for chain-smoking Marlboros and having two desserts for lunch, dealt with heart trouble over the years.
In 1995, he suffered a heart attack that nearly killed him and required quadruple bypass surgery; Attorney General Janet Reno, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick and senior aides held an unofficial ceremony at his hospital room to award him his 30-year pin, according to “Main Justice,” a book by Jim McGee and Brian Duffy.
He continued working as the associate deputy attorney general until his death.
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Remembering A Career Prosecutor Who Leaned Into Controversy — And Took The Heat
David Margolis at his desk in June 2015. (The Washington Post/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
It can be hard to distinguish among the men wearing grey suits and regulation haircuts on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. But David Margolis always brought a splash of color.
It wasn't his lovably disheveled wardrobe, or his Elvis ring, but something else: the force of his flamboyant personality. Margolis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, didn't want to fit in with the crowd. He wanted to stand out.
Margolis, 76, died Tuesday after putting in 51 years of service to the Justice Department. In those years, he touched nearly every major case and controversy for a generation or more.
When he fell and injured his elbow last year, colleagues in the deputy attorney general's office avoided a flower bouquet and instead sent him an assortment of deli meats.
He used to refer to me as deputy attorney general as 'the bionic babe.' Who does that? Who does that?
Jamie Gorelick
Margolis arrived at the Justice Department wearing bushy sideburns and a leisure suit, a hot-shot pursuing organized crime and drug cartels in the late 1960s and 1970s.
While his cohort left public service after a few years to go make money, Margolis remained. He went onto become the most senior career lawyer at the Justice Department, a fearless troubleshooter for political appointees like Democrat Jamie Gorelick.
"I told my staff when I was deputy attorney general, 'I want you to keep me from doing dumb things. I want you to help me do smart things but I really want you to keep me from doing dumb things,'" Gorelick recalled. "And there were many times when he would come into my office and say, 'that letter you just drafted, stick it in your drawer. That action the FBI wants you to take, they're trying to put you in the trick box. Don't do it.'"
Margolis specialized in using humor to take important people down a peg. He famously dubbed straight-laced former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III "Bobby Three Sticks" and upon his retirement, teased that Mueller, a former Marine, would have made an excellent drill instructor on Parris Island.
And as for Gorelick, she said, laughing, "he used to refer to me as deputy attorney general as 'the bionic babe.' Who does that? Who does that?"
Margolis laughs as FBI Director James Comey appears at the lectern dressed as him for his 50-year pin ceremony in 2015. (Lonnie Tague/Courtesy Justice Department)
Margolis became the punchline last year, when Justice Department officials of Democratic and Republican administrations flocked to the building's Great Hall to honor him for 50 years of service. Current FBI Director James B. Comey donned a lackluster sport coat, a checked shirt partially hanging out the front of his pants, and an orange-striped tie in an homage to Margolis's eccentric fashion sense.
Not everyone laughed. Over his long tenure, Margolis made judgments about which prosecutors should face discipline. Critics are still angry about his decision not to punish lawyers who approved waterboarding and other brutal interrogation during the George W. Bush years. They also say Margolis went soft on prosecutors who engaged in misconduct against late Sen. Ted Stevens R-Alaska.
Margolis' office seen Wednesday morning. (Brian Tomney /Courtesy Justice Department)
Margolis took the heat for the political appointees who served as his nominal bosses, and as usual, made no public response.
His friend, FBI Director Comey, says Margolis "was the United States Department of Justice."
Comey added: "He was what we all hope to be. 'Irreplaceable' is usually hyperbole; here, it is simply true."
Margolis's death Tuesday afternoon followed a series of health troubles. In 1995, his heart stopped in his messy office on the fourth floor at the Justice Department.
But Margolis bounced back with the help of a quadruple bypass. He stopped smoking Marlboros and went back to work. Saturdays, too.
In all, the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys says he served 20 different attorneys general, a career path he once told NPR might be a relic.
"Washington is a tough place to live and work so with all that in mind I don't see people staying as long anymore," Margolis said back in 2007.
On Wednesday, his office at Justice headquarters is dark. Two baseball jerseys bearing the word "Margolis" still hang in the windows.
| The Hill, December 31, 2018 - Where have you gone David Margolis? - "Margolis, who died in 2016 at age 76, had been the longest-serving lawyer at DOJ, beginning his service under Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach who had been Attorney General Robert Kennedy's Deputy. Margolis served under 19 U.S. Attorney General's over the span of 51 years. In the leadership offices at the Justice Department, one's stature is marked by the difficulty of the matters placed in one's "portfolio." Margolis had the most difficult ones; including being tasked with the search of White House Counsel Vince Foster's office after Foster's suicide during the Clinton administration, and deciding whether to seek discipline for the department lawyers who had authorized the practice of waterboarding." | ||
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