Karin Immergut

American judge (born 1960)

Karin Johanna Immergut (born 1960) is an American lawyer who has served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon since 2019. She has concurrently served as a judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since 2024.

Early life

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Immergut was born in Brooklyn , New York City, in 1960.

Her father was an Austrian chemist and her mother a Swedish mathematician. Her parents married in Sweden and then immigrated to the United States, where Karin was born.

Immergut graduated from Amherst College in 1982 with her Bachelor of Arts degree; upon graduation, she worked as a special assistant at the New York City Departments of Juvenile Justice and Corrections.

Immergut then attended the UC Berkeley School of Law , graduating with her Juris Doctor in 1987. While a student, she was managing editor of the Boalt Hall Journal of Industrial Relations (now _Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law _).

Career

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After law school she worked as a litigation associate at the law firm of Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. , for one year.

Following private practice, Immergut served as an assistant United States attorney for the Central District of California in Los Angeles for six years. During her tenure in the Central District of California, she prosecuted several large-scale complex narcotics trafficking and money laundering cases and served as a deputy chief of the Narcotics Section and chief of the Training Section. She then moved to Burlington, Vermont , to work for the firm Gravel & Shea for two years.

Immergut served for five years as a deputy district attorney in Portland, Oregon , where she primarily prosecuted white collar crimes . In 1998, while serving as a deputy district attorney, she went to work for independent counsel Kenneth Starr , who was investigating then-President Bill Clinton . Immergut personally questioned Monica Lewinsky in an August 6, 1998, deposition. In 2001, she joined the U.S. attorney's office in Portland as an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Oregon . Serving two years in the position, she prosecuted cases involving white collar crime and worked on Project Safe Neighborhoods , a national gun violence reduction initiative.

U.S. attorney

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Immergut as U.S. attorney in 2008

Immergut was sworn in as interim United States attorney on October 3, 2003, and the United States Senate confirmed her nomination the same day. She was appointed by President George W. Bush to the position. Bush signed her commission to serve as the United States attorney for the District of Oregon on October 4, 2003, and she was sworn in on October 8. She succeeded Michael W. Mosman in that role.

As U.S. attorney, Immergut served as the district's top federal law enforcement official. She managed a staff of approximately 107 people, including 51 assistant U.S. attorneys, who handled civil litigation on behalf of the United States and criminal investigations and prosecutions involving violations of federal law such as white-collar crime, narcotics trafficking, violent crime, money laundering, and cybercrime. Immergut also served on the Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys .

In January 2008, Immergut applied to succeed Judge Garr King on the United States District Court for Oregon. She was initially considered the leading candidate for the post as the preferred choice of U.S. Senator Gordon H. Smith . But after news reports highlighted her role in the investigation of President Bill Clinton 's sex scandal, she was not one of the final candidates for the position, which went to Marco A. Hernandez . She re-registered as a Republican at the beginning of Bush's first term as president, in the same month that she went to work for Mosman. She resigned from the office in July 2009 in order to be appointed as Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge.

Federal judicial service

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On June 7, 2018, President Trump announced his intent to nominate Immergut to serve as a United States district judge for the [United States District Court for the District of Oregon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_District_of_Oregon "United States District Court for the District of Oreg

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