Page 102 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ACT WITH INTEGRITY

November in the same case the previous caller had been asking about,” Igle-
sias explained. “The case wasn’t ready for filing yet, but I couldn’t tell him
that. Instead I told him I didn’t think so, and he said, ‘I am very sorry to
hear that.’ And then the line went dead. This guy held my political future
in his hands, so to speak, and I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear, which
was that I’d move heaven and earth to get this indictment filed now.”
A few weeks later, Iglesias was boarding a flight from Baltimore to
Albuquerque when he received a phone call from a Justice Department
official demanding his resignation—no explanation given. Iglesias’s rising
star came crashing to earth in an instant. He felt like the world’s loneliest
man during his long flight home, but he soon would learn that he wasn’t
alone. Six of his colleagues had received the same phone call with the same
bad news that day, and one of them was the only other former White
House Fellow in the administration’s U.S. attorney class: John McKay.
McKay had been a litigator in a prominent Seattle law firm for several
years before being selected as a White House Fellow and serving as a special
assistant to FBI Director William Sessions. When McKay’s Fellowship
ended, he returned to Seattle and became a managing partner of another
firm until he returned to Washington, D.C., in 1997 to serve as president
of the Legal Services Corporation, a congressionally chartered nonprofit
that gives people with low incomes equal access to the civil justice system.
As a U.S. attorney appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001, McKay
had coordinated federal law enforcement activity for the Western District
of Washington from his office in Seattle for five years, doubling criminal
prosecutions and leading U.S. and Canadian law enforcement efforts to
stem the flow of illegal drugs and human trafficking across the interna-
tional border. An experienced litigator and prosecutor, he personally
handled the office’s most important cases, including the sentencing and
appeals of Ahmed Ressam, the notorious Millennium Bomber who sought
to destroy Los Angeles International Airport in 2000.
In 2006, while some in the Justice Department were preparing to
dismiss an unprecedented nine U.S. attorneys, McKay received the Navy’s
highest civilian award for his innovative law enforcement information-
sharing system, which remains in wide use around the country. He
undoubtedly had done an outstanding job, as reflected by his recently con-
cluded Justice Department performance evaluation, which lauded him as
a strong and innovative U.S. attorney. McKay’s refusal to intervene in the

87