Karin Immergut

Early life

Karin Immergut was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 22, 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. She graduated from Amherst College in 1982 and received her law degree in 1987 from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. After law school she worked as a litigation associate at the law firm of Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. for one year.

Legal career

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, Immergut prosecuted several large-scale complex narcotics and money laundering cases and served as a Deputy Chief of the Narcotics Section and Chief of the Training Section. She spent six years there and then moved to Burlington, Vermont, to work for the firm Gravel & Shea for two years. In 1996, Immergut then moved to Portland, Oregon, where she married James T. McDermott and was hired by Multnomah County.

Immergut served for five years as a Deputy District Attorney in Portland, where she primarily prosecuted white collar crimes. In 1998, Immergut was a Multnomah County deputy district attorney and a longtime Democrat when she went to work for Ken Starr, who was investigating then-President Bill Clinton. She re-registered as an independent upon taking that position. 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

Immergut was sworn in as interim United States Attorney on October 3, 2003, and the United States Senate confirmed her nomination on that same date. 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 as the United States Attorney on October 8, 2003. She succeeded Michael W. Mosman in that role.

As U.S. Attorney, Immergut serves 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. In addition, Immergut served on the Attorney General's Advisory Committee.

In January 2008, Immergut applied to succeed Judge Garr King on the Oregon District Court. She was initially considered the leading candidate for the post, as the preferred choice of U.S. Senator Gordon Smith. But after news reports highlighting her role in the investigation of president Bill Clinton's sex scandal, she was not one of the final candidates for the position. 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. Attorney Brandon Mayfield blamed Immergut more than anyone else at a local level for her role in his being falsely accused of terrorist activity in 2004. She resigned from the office in July 2009 in order to be appointed as a circuit court judge for Multnomah County.