Top federal prosecutor in West Texas resigns from post
EL PASO, Texas -- U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas John Bash, the top federal prosecutor for a vast region that extends from El Paso to Austin, announced Monday that he is stepping down at week's end.
"This Friday—eight years to the day after I first joined the Department of Justice—I will step down as United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas," Bash said in a statement. "Last month I accepted an offer for a position in the private sector and informed the Attorney General of my decision. I tendered formal letters of resignation to both the President and the Attorney General this morning."
The 39-year-old Bash, an Austin resident whose U.S. Attorney's Office is headquartered in San Antonio, did not identify the new position he had accepted.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr said he was appointing Gregg Sofer, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, to succeed Bash.
"Sofer appears to be well qualified because he did serve as an assistant U.S. Attorney for a number of years in the western district of Texas and was the Criminal Chief there and has served in the Department of Justice Headquarters in D.C. as counselor to AG Barr," observed Carl Tobias, the chair of the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia.
Bash took the lead of one of the largest U.S. Attorney offices in the country back in December 2017 after serving as a special assistant to President Trump and associate White House counsel.
In addition, Bash was as a former clerk to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and clerked for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appellate court judge.
Bash’s departure comes as his office is prosecuting the alleged gunman in the 2019 Cielo Vista Walmart shooting in El Paso that killed 23 people and injured dozens more.
Bash brought 90 federal counts against alleged gunman Patrick Crusius, with more than 20 counts of hate crimes resulting in death and more than 40 charges of firing a weapon in relation to the hate crimes.
“No day was worse than August 3, 2019, when we lost so many of our fellow Americans and our Mexican brothers and sisters to an almost inconceivable act of hatred,” Bash said in a statement. “But there was nothing more soul-stirring than the way El Pasoans came together in the wake of that nightmare in a spirit of love and perseverance.”
(The Associated Press and The Texas Tribune contributed to this report.)
