Senate Confirms Aaron Peterson As Alaska’s Newest Federal Judge
There is now one less federal judge vacancy in Alaska after the U.S. Senate voted 58 to 39 to confirm Aaron Peterson as the state’s newest federal judge. Peterson is currently the state’s natural resources attorney.
Peterson said in a legal notice issued soon after the vote that he would be leaving the Alaska Department of Law right away. There are three federal judges in Alaska, but since Joshua Kindred resigned in July 2024 amid a misconduct scandal, there has been only one sitting judge.
Peterson, a registered Republican, will take over for Judge Tim Burgess, who retired on the last day of 2021. That open seat was one of the oldest in the whole U.S. federal court system, as reported by Alaska Beacon.
Alaska’s federal court has had to rely on judges from other states and semi-retired judges who are on senior status because it only has one full-time judge.
There was a lot of bipartisan support for Peterson’s confirmation, with six Democrats voting for it along with most of the Senate’s Republicans. All 39 “no” votes came from Democrats, and three senators did not vote.
Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and the highest-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee from the opposing party, voted “yes.”
Peterson said last year that he wouldn’t say whether President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election or whether the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was legal because he might have to rule on the matter as a judge.
Carl Tobias, the Williams Chair in Law at the University of Richmond School of Law, has been closely monitoring Peterson’s confirmation process.
“It wasn’t a party line vote. And so I think that means that some of the Democrats are signaling that if a person looks like he’s going to be competent, as I think Peterson will be, then they’re going to move forward and vote for that person,” he said.
Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan organized a committee that examined Peterson’s judicial application and forwarded it to President Donald Trump for official nomination.
The committee bypassed the usual procedure, which relies on advice from the Alaska Bar Association.
“I’m confident that he will be a great federal judge for our state,” he said in a prepared written statement.
According to the information Peterson submitted to the U.S. Senate’s judiciary committee, he was born in Anchorage in 1981 and served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000 to 2003 before attending the University of Alaska Anchorage, graduating in 2007. He attended Gonzaga University School of Law and graduated in 2010. He was admitted to the Alaska bar that year.
He returned to Alaska after graduation, serving first as a clerk to Judge Michael Spaan of the Anchorage Superior Court, then as a prosecutor with the Municipality of Anchorage.
Peterson worked in the Anchorage District Attorney’s office starting in 2012, including on violent felonies, such as murder and sexual assault. He moved to the Department of Law’s office of special prosecutions in 2015 before beginning work with the Department of Law’s natural resources section in 2019.
Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski didn’t participate in Peterson’s application process but offered her support after Trump nominated Peterson and voted for his confirmation on Wednesday.
“I look forward to Mr. Peterson hitting the ground running to help an overworked court, while working to address and reform the culture of abuse and low morale that has permeated the District Court in recent years,” Murkowski said in a prepared written statement. “Mr. Peterson is a born-and-raised Alaskan with a strong record of legal practice in our state, including in natural resources and criminal and civil law, and his leadership will be invaluable to Alaska. We now turn our focus to filling the remaining vacancy as soon as possible.”
Top DHS Special Agent And His Wife Found Dead
A Department of Homeland Security special agent and his wife were found dead in their New Jersey home in what appears to be a murder-suicide, prosecutors said.
Police in Sayreville responded to the couple’s home on Glynn Court around 8 p.m. July 3 and found Kelly Latauro, 46, dead inside the residence, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said.
Her husband, 52-year-old Christopher Latauro, was discovered dead in the backyard.
Both appear to have been shot.
Authorities said Christopher is believed to be the shooter and the case is being investigated as a murder-suicide.
Police told residents to keep away from Glynn Court, from Deerfield Road to Scarlet Drive, briefly because of police activity.
The area was reopened about 40 minutes later, but police remained on scene.
According to NJ101.5, citing DHS records from 2019 and 2020, Christopher was a special agent for the Department of Homeland Security.
Authorities have not said what may have sparked the violence.
Kelly’s sister-in-law Robyn Perlman-Spencer confirmed her death in a Facebook post on July 7, remembering her in a heartbreaking tribute.
“As many of you may now know, my beautiful sister in law Kelly Iatauro was senselessly and suddenly taken from us on Friday. Kelly was a bright light- kind, thoughtful, hysterical, inappropriate, and just one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. She left a lasting impression on anyone that was lucky enough to know her,” Robyn wrote in part.
Sayreville police confirmed officers responded to the Glynn Court residence on July 3 and found both people dead of gunshot wounds.
The incident is being treated as a murder-suicide, and Christopher is suspected to be the shooter, the spokesperson said.
The Department of Homeland Security and Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office did not immediately respond to additional requests for comment on the case.
What began as a heavy police response to a deadly scene left two people dead and the quiet Middlesex County neighborhood stunned.
Investigators are still trying to piece together what happened inside the home leading up to the gunfire.
Separately, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin made headlines last week with an election-related announcement.
Mullin on Friday said officials who don’t cooperate with the administration’s election security efforts may be slapped with fines — and potentially prison time.
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections — and they chose not to — then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin said during a press conference at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Mullin also promised DHS would work to “speed up our security enhancements” for states.
He vowed to hold up federal election security grants until state officials took steps the administration demanded, including running their voter registration lists through a system that checks for non-citizen voters on the rolls.
Mullin made his comments after President Donald Trump’s primetime address on election security Thursday night, when he repeated already known concerns about the security of voting systems, alleged Chinese efforts to get into voter rolls, and aired old gripes about the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
In his remarks on Friday, the DHS secretary focused on DHS’s work with states to secure election systems and scrub voter registration rolls for fraud and concerns about noncitizen voting.
The Justice Department also sent letters this month threatening prosecution to election officials across the country if they don’t remove noncitizens from their voter rolls.
On Friday, Mullin seemed to suggest that the agency was able to estimate the numbers using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and said 23 states are already working with DHS to analyze voter rolls.
And he criticized the legal challenges that are hindering the administration’s efforts: Last month, a judge blocked the Trump administration from creating a database of information about Americans, including Social Security numbers and citizenship status.
