Clock Ticks on Finalizing Northern California’s Top Prosecutor

The newly appointed US Attorney for the Northern District of California said he’s trying not to think much about his dwindling time as head of the federal prosecutor’s office before federal judges in the San Francisco-based district court must vote to keep him on.

“My term is 120 days and that clock is ticking,” said Craig Missakian, who was appointed in late May by Attorney General Pam Bondi. “I’m just trying to kind of put my head down and do the best job I can.”

The comments by Missakian at a Wednesday evening event in San Francisco come a day after a New York federal court declined to appoint Trump’s temporary US Attorney pick to serve as permanent prosecutor.

Missakian’s appointment by the attorney general ends Sept. 27 unless judges for the US District Court for the Northern District of California vote on whether to retain him, as the Senate won’t have time to finalize his nomination sooner.

During his limited time to show what he’ll do as the Northern District of California’s top prosecutor, Missakian has struck a quieter tone than his counterpart in Southern California. Trump’s appointee in Los Angeles, US Attorney Bill Essayli, is known for clashing with state Democrats and has been outspoken on social media. Missakian said he refrains from using social media or interacting much with the press. He hasn’t brought the kind of controversial cases Essayli has focused on.

“Our job is not political in any way, it’s to do justice in every case, and that is not a political question,” he said at the event hosted by the Northern District Court Practice Program.

Still, the Republican said that before he moved up to San Francisco to take the job, he had some nerves about the political environment. The prosecutor, who served as deputy chief counsel on the Congressional probe into the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans, replaced the Biden-appointed US Attorney Ismail Ramsey in February amid Trump’s nationwide purge of US Attorneys.

“My mind was starting to play tricks on me, I upset somebody when I was in Washington on the Benghazi investigation,” he said. “This is like the joke they’re playing on you, they’re dropping me in the bluest of blue districts in the country.”

Prior to accepting this job as top prosecutor, Missakian was a criminal defense attorney, with his own practice in Pasadena, Calif., and has been working on the defense bar since 2018.

He also served as an assistant US attorney for the Los Angeles-based Central District of California from 2001 to 2010, where he prosecuted a number of high profile cases in Los Angeles including of Aryan Brotherhood members and an espionage case against an engineer who was convicted of sending US military secrets to the People’s Republic of China over several decades.

In 2007, he was part of the team prosecuting a local Southern California politician who lied about having been awarded the Medal of Honor. The case ultimately reached the US Supreme Court, which struck down the law as unconstitutional.