Biden names Dallas prosecutor Damien Diggs first Black U.S. attorney for East Texas

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden picked career Dallas prosecutor Damien Diggs as U.S. attorney in East Texas. If confirmed, he would become the first Black lawyer to lead the office responsible for federal law enforcement from Plano to Beaumont, including Jasper, where a notorious racial murder took place.

The nomination, announced Wednesday night by the White House, ended months of inexplicable delay that persisted despite strong bipartisan support for Diggs.

Both of Texas’ Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, had lobbied for the nomination. So had Eddie Bernice Johnson of Dallas, the state’s senior Democrat in Congress until she retired last month.

When Biden named his picks to lead the other three U.S. attorney offices in Texas in mid-October, Cruz stepped up the pressure by openly accusing him of snubbing Diggs without explanation. Calling him a “stellar candidate” who faced “puzzling” resistance, Cruz wrote to White House counsel Stuart Delery at the time, the pick would be “particularly significant” in light of a 1998 racially tinged murder.

With the nomination secure, Cruz invoked that incident again.

“Once confirmed, Damien will be the first African-American U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, a significant milestone given that James Byrd Jr. was murdered in the Eastern District in 1998 after being dragged to death, and that remnants of the Ku Klux Klan operated in the area as recently as the 1990s,” Cruz said. “Damien is a skilled prosecutor and community leader, and his nomination sends a strong, positive message of how far we have come as a nation. I look forward to his swift confirmation.”

Halfway through his term, Biden has now named U.S. attorneys for 68 of the nation’s 93 districts.

The Senate confirmed the other three Texas U.S. attorneys by voice vote on Dec. 6.

The Eastern District covers 43 of Texas’ 254 counties. Apart from Plano and Beaumont, it includes Sherman, Tyler, Marshall and Texarkana.

Diggs has served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Dallas-based Northern District of Texas since 2018, working in the Criminal Division’s Violent Crimes Section. That came after a six-year stint as an assistant U.S. attorney in the nation’s capital, where he handled homicides and other criminal cases.

For five years before that, he worked at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

All four of Biden’s U.S. attorney picks for Texas were recommended by a panel of Texas lawyers that advises Cruz and Cornyn on judicial selections. They were also on lists submitted by Johnson, a key player on such matters whenever Democrats held the White House.

attorney in Dallas, is shown in this 2018 photo from the…” src=”https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/ZilXq5ptMnNN1U5wJ0ge-PEy11o=/930×0/smart/filters:no_upscale()/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/FCNQNZ54DNE6TMBFSSKLINZ75Q.jpg” class=”dmnc_images-img-module__Xy7LP max-w-full text-white object-contain”/>Damien Diggs, an assistant U.S. attorney in Dallas, is shown in this 2018 photo from the Justice Department. Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn have urged President Joe Biden to nominate him as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.(US Department of Justice)

Cornyn called him “a veteran federal prosecutor with experience handling a broad range of cases…. I look forward to seeing him ensure the government is well-represented in Texas courtrooms.”

Diggs graduated from Towson University in suburban Baltimore, and earned his law degree at American University in 2003.

In the 2020 election, Diggs oversaw complaints in the Northern District related to election fraud and voting rights.

That same year he secured guilty pleas from three gun dealers who sold guns at Dallas-area gun shows without conducting background checks on buyers. The Northern District has also touted convictions he was involved with in cases of bank fraud and child porn.

In Dallas, Biden promoted the top appellate lawyer for the Northern District, Leigha Simonton, a Yale Law School graduate who had joined the office in 2005.

Among her most high-profile cases, she unsuccessfully tried to send Dallas County commissioner John Wiley Price to prison in 2017 on charges of bribery and tax evasion.

For the San Antonio-based Western District, Biden installed El Paso County’s district attorney for 27 years, Jaime Esparza, who had secured a capital murder indictment against the gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in Aug. 2019.

In the Houston-based Southern District, Biden elevated a longtime assistant U.S. attorney, Alamdar Hamdani, who had worked at the Justice Department on national security and counterterrorism cases.

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