[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 192 (Wednesday, December 14, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2250-E2251]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




RECOGNITION OF GREGORY C. BRADY UPON HIS RETIREMENT FROM THE DEPARTMENT 
                               OF JUSTICE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JEFF FORTENBERRY

                              of nebraska

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, December 14, 2011

  Mr. FORTENBERRY. Mr. Speaker, today I would like to honor and pay 
tribute to Gregory C. Brady, a fellow Nebraskan and the Principal 
Deputy General Counsel for the Office of Justice Programs, in the U.S. 
Department of Justice, who is retiring after forty-six years of 
remarkable public service in the interests of justice. His tireless 
dedication to the multi-faceted work of the Department, reflected in 
his many career accomplishments, have earned him great respect and 
recognition in the Office of Justice Programs and its component 
agencies, and throughout the Department and among his fellow attorneys 
at bar. I want to take a moment to memorialize his extraordinary and 
inspiring accomplishments.
  Greg Brady was born and reared in Nebraska, graduating from the 
University of Nebraska in 1962, with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and in 
1965, with a Juris Doctorate.

[[Page E2251]]

 Thereafter, Mr. Brady served a three-year tour of duty in the Judge 
Advocate General Corps of the U.S. Navy (from which, after prosecuting 
and defending scores of cases, he was honorably discharged with the 
rank of Lieutenant). Mr. Brady began his service with the Department of 
Justice in December 1968, as an Assistant United States Attorney in the 
District of Columbia, and has been continuously serving the Department 
of Justice, and the public, faithfully and in an exemplary manner ever 
since.
  In the United States Attorney's Office, he demonstrated his 
flexibility of mind and zealous devotion to duty in countless criminal 
(misdemeanors, felonies, grand juries, etc.) and civil cases that he 
litigated, at the trial and appellate levels, many of which cases 
involved groundbreaking questions of law. Mitchell v. Laird, for 
example, 488 F.2d 611 (D.C. Cir. 1973), was brought unsuccessfully by 
thirteen members of the U.S. House of Representatives to enjoin the 
involvement of U.S. military personnel in the Vietnam conflict, and 
involved complex Constitutional questions of standing, executive 
prerogative, and justiciability. United States v. Crowder, 543 F.2d 312 
(D.C. Cir. 1976)--which Mr. Brady's arguments (opposed by those of Mr. 
Robert Bennett) initially won at the District Court, then lost before a 
Circuit Court panel, and then won in an en banc proceeding of the 
Circuit Court--was the first case in the country to approve use of a 
search warrant to require a suspect to submit to surgery so the police 
could obtain a bullet as evidence of his criminal activity. (The case 
against Crowder (a two-time murderer) for the murder of a prominent 
Washington dentist was considered weak, because the only evidence known 
to the police that could link him firmly to the earlier crime were the 
bullets lodged in his arm and leg, from his murder-victim's gun. It was 
Mr. Brady's idea to try to obtain a search warrant for the bullets; he 
also thought of the stratagem of deputizing the (anxious) physicians 
from Georgetown University Hospital as U.S. Marshals for purposes of 
the surgery. Judge McGowan's concurrence (as does Judge Leventhal's 
dissent) goes out of its way to praise Mr. Brady's prosecution for the 
procedural orderliness and fair play it consistently demonstrated in 
the case. The case was featured in a Time magazine article.) This kind 
of legal creativity and strict adherence to the rule of law remains 
typical of Mr. Brady, nearly thirty of whose cases are officially 
reported in the published court records.
  Having attained the rank of Deputy Chief of the Appellate Division at 
the United States Attorney's Office here in the City, Mr. Brady began 
his career with the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance 
Administration (the predecessor agency to the Office of Justice 
Programs) in February 1974, formally in the Office of the General 
Counsel, but actually detailed to assist in the creation and 
development of grant and support programs to assist States in improving 
the management of prosecution offices, combating career criminals, and 
reducing white-collar crime. His prosecutorial experience in the Navy 
and the United States Attorney's Office made him invaluable to the 
program, which, itself, is at the heart of the core mission of the 
Office of Justice Programs. In 1980 (at his request), Mr. Brady 
returned to the direct practice of law, in the agency's Office of the 
General Counsel, dispensing advice and rendering opinions on countless 
matters relating to every conceivable area of administrative law.
  In 1984, on account of his vast practical and administrative 
experience, he was asked to found, and become the first Director of, a 
new Office of Justice Programs component, which eventually was to 
become the Office for Victims of Crime--a signal initiative of 
President Reagan's administration. And he did found that office, on 
firm and sound lines, co-authoring what eventually was enacted as the 
Victim Compensation and Assistance Act of 1984 (Pub. L. 98-473), which 
clearly sets forth the purposes and organic principles of the office--
purposes and principles that remain in place today. His mission at that 
office accomplished, some three years later, the leadership of the 
Office of Justice Programs acquiesced in Mr. Brady's request to return 
to its Office of the General Counsel, where he has served ever since.
  He has been the principal ethics officer at the Office of Justice 
Programs since 1988 (in which capacity he has provided excellent 
guidance, training, and advice to the General Counsel, Presidential 
appointees, and career employees, alike), and in 1996 became the Deputy 
General Counsel, after having served for years as Associate General 
Counsel; he became Principal Deputy General Counsel in 2001.
  For the last twenty-four years, Mr. Brady has applied a firm sense of 
purpose and integrity to instructing numberless Department employees in 
how to negotiate the minefields of ethical situations associated with 
administration of a multi-billion-dollar-a-year grant-making operation. 
At a time when the corporate world has endured significant ethical and 
moral lapses, Mr. Brady's personal efforts consistently have guided 
officials of the Department with a minimum of public conflict or 
scandal, and with the result that there is a clear public perception--
necessary to the success of any government program--of even-handedness 
in the administration of the Office of Justice Programs' criminal-
justice grant programs.
  Mr. Brady's love of the law and its practitioners in the legal 
profession manifested itself in his generous devotion of time and 
attention to mentoring law students and newly-minted attorneys during 
the critical development stages of their careers. As Deputy General 
Counsel over the past twenty years, he has guided (even shepherded) 
them, with his approachable, kindly, and affable manner. His deep 
understanding and wide experience in the law made him an inspiring and 
effective teacher. Mr. Brady genuinely delighted in seeing the progress 
and development of attorneys, and their embrace of the highest 
standards of the legal profession; and the number and variety of law 
firms and government agencies that have been affected by individuals 
originally trained by him is impressive. (These include an Assistant 
Attorney General, as well as the Executive Director of a Government 
Corporation and a past Presidential appointee responsible for juvenile-
justice issues.) In the Office of the General Counsel, he has 
demonstrated outstanding legal research, presentation, and advocacy 
skills, and has been a true role model for all of the attorneys, 
greatly assisting in their professional development.
  And ``role model'' is, in fact, the apt term: for Mr. Brady is no 
one-dimensional work-is-my-life attorney. Despite his aggressive work 
schedule, he has lived his vocation as a family man (he is the father 
of three adored daughters and grandfather to two no-less-adored 
granddaughters) to the full, and his community has known that he can be 
depended upon to volunteer his time for others. To give but one 
example: For over twenty years, he has been a night-time volunteer 
(i.e., after putting in a full-day's work) at a crisis/suicide hotline 
in Prince William County, Virginia. In 2001, he was named their 
``Exceptional Volunteer of the Year.'' His tireless volunteer work in 
his community and parish have earned him numerous Attorney-General 
commendations over the years.
  It is no small thing to stress that Mr. Brady has performed all of 
these tasks with unfailing courtesy, professionalism, and kindness (to 
say nothing of his ever-present humor and sharp wit). The long and 
short of it is that Mr. Brady simply is someone who, quietly and 
unassumingly, has kept the Department of Justice (and especially the 
Office of Justice Programs) running. Although his career in the 
Department hardly has been typical (at least in that it does not mostly 
involve litigation), Mr. Brady epitomizes the ideal of a Department of 
Justice attorney. For this reason, he has received both the Attorney 
General's Mary C. Lawton Lifetime Service Award (one of the 
Department's very highest awards), as well as the Office of Justice 
Programs' Assistant Attorney General's Lifetime Achievement Award. And 
for his years of dedicated public service, he received a personal 
commendation from President George W. Bush.
  Gregory C. Brady has dedicated his professional life to public 
service, and his many accomplishments during the forty-six years of 
that professional life are a credit to him, to his family, to his home 
State of Nebraska, to the Department of Justice, and to his local 
community of which he is such an active, generous, and vibrant member.

                          ____________________