Anthony Moscato

Anthony Charles Moscato (September 4, 1945, New York City, to June 12, 2026, Fairfax, Virginia) spent his career in the administrative offices of the Department of Justice. Raised in Washington Heights, he took a degree in government at Columbia University in 1967 and a law degree at George Washington University in 1970, joined the department's Tax Division as a trial attorney in 1976, and moved the next year to the Justice Management Division as special assistant to the assistant attorney general for administration. Over the following two decades he served as deputy assistant attorney general for administration, acting inspector general of the department, director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys and director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review. In 1999 the attorney general named him a member of the Board of Immigration Appeals, from which he retired in 2006.¹

The Bason Allegation

His name entered the INSLAW affair through Bill Hamilton, who told the special counsel Nicholas J. Bua that a former department security officer, Garnett Taylor, knew that "Anthony Moscato, who is now Acting Director of EOUSA, played an affirmative role on behalf of DOJ in denying Judge Bason's reappointment," and asked that Taylor be subpoenaed before a grand jury. George Bason, the bankruptcy judge who had found in 1987 that the department took INSLAW's PROMIS software by fraud, was not reappointed by the merit selection panel of the district court chaired by Judge Norma H. Johnson. Bua's report records Moscato's answer: "he had nothing whatsoever to do with the selection of bankruptcy judges. He convincingly stated that he is not familiar with Judge Norma Johnson, did not know that she chaired a selection panel, and did not even know there was a Merit Selection Panel. He stated that he spoke to no one about Bason's qualifications for reappointment. He cannot explain why his and Garnett Taylor's names would be used in the same sentence as Bankruptcy Judge Bason. Taylor and he are not even social friends, much less confidants." At the time of the 1987 non-reappointment he held other administrative posts in the department; the transcript of Bason's ruling had reached the panel from Royce Lamberth, then chief of the civil division of the U.S. Attorney's office.²