Martha Pacold, '02: Highlights from Pacold's Disclosures to the Senate Judiciary Committee
Get to Know Martha Pacold, Treasury Lawyer and Ex-Thomas Clerk Up for Court Seat
Martha Pacold, a former trial lawyer at Bartlit Beck, is a Trump administration nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Here are several highlights from the former Clarence Thomas clerk's Senate questionnaire and financial disclosure.
In June 2017, Martha Pacold was just months into her tenure as a U.S. Treasury Department lawyer when a White House attorney called about interviewing her for a potential nomination to the federal bench.
Five days later, lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and the White House Counsel’s Office spoke with Pacold. They would remain in contact for months as she was reviewed by a screening committee—established by Illinois’ senators to evaluate the president’s picks for judgeships in the state—which eventually recommended her for a nomination to Chicago’s federal district court.
Pacold, a former partner at Chicago-based Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, revealed that initial contact as part of her response to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s questionnaire for judicial nominees. Formally nominated on June 11, Pacold also described her past work in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration and the most notable cases she handled as a partner at her former law firm.
At the Supreme Court that term, her fellow clerks included Jeffrey Wall, '03, a former top appellate lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell who now serves as the principal deputy U.S. solicitor general, and Henry Whitaker, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Jennifer Hardy, of counsel in the Kirkland & Ellis litigation practice, also clerked for Thomas that term. Pacold is a 2002 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. Pacold held two other clerkships—she clerked for A. Raymond Randolph on the D.C. Circuit from 2002 to 2003, and the next year for Jay Bybee on the Ninth Circuit.
Read more at The National Law Journal