Two longtime federal prosecutors and a former El Paso district attorney have been nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as U.S. attorneys in Texas.
The nominations, announced Friday by the White House, are:
– Leigha Simonton as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas. Simonton, an assistant U.S. attorney in Dallas since 2005, is a former law clerk to Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and, earlier, to U.S. District Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn, the immediate past chief judge in the Northern District. Simonton is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Yale Law School.
– Alamdar Hamdani as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas. Hamdani, an assistant U.S. attorney in the district since 2014, has focused as a prosecutor on combatting terrorism and public corruption. Before moving to Houston in 2015, he spent five years with the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section in Washington, D.C., the last two as deputy chief. Hamdani is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston Law Center,
– Jaime Esparza as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas. Esparza was the El Paso County district attorney from 1993 to 2020. Before that, he served in the El Paso County Public Defender’s Office and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. He’s a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston Law Center.
The nominations are subject to Senate confirmation.
Biden has yet to nominate a U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas. The Texas Lawbook reported in August that the leading candidate for that position was Damien Diggs, a veteran federal prosecutor in Dallas and Washington