WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- President Bush has named senior Justice Department national security official Ken Wainstein to be his new homeland security adviser, replacing Fran Townsend.
He also named his pick to be director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, saying he would nominate current deputy head and acting director Michael Leiter to the vacant post.
In a statement Wednesday announcing Wainstein's appointment, Bush called him "a proven leader and a dedicated public servant with nearly two decades of law enforcement experience."
Wainstein's career as a federal prosecutor began in 1989 when he left Washington, where he had clerked for Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the U.S. District Court, and became an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York.
In 1992 he returned to work in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, where he specialized in the prosecution of federal racketeering cases against violent street gangs, according to the Justice Department. He became interim U.S. attorney for the district in April 2001 but later that year was selected to run the Justice Department's Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, overseeing all 94 offices nationwide.
He moved to the FBI the following year, where he was first general counsel and then chief of staff before returning to Justice as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia again in 2004. In October 2005 he was confirmed in that post, but less than a year later he became the first assistant attorney general for national security.
In that job he headed the new National Security Division at the Justice Department. The division, which brings together prosecutors working counter-terrorism, counterintelligence and other kinds of national security cases, was established as part of the reforms of U.S. intelligence in the wake of the failure to prevent Sept. 11 and the Iraq WMD debacle.
Leiter moved to the National Counter-Terrorism Center from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he was deputy chief of staff. Previously, he was a senior staffer on the President's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Leiter received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University and his JD from Harvard Law School.
