President Donald Trump announced the nomination of Julia Díaz Rex to head the federal prosecutor’s office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, moving to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Stephen Muldrow late in this session of the U.S. Senate. Trump referred Díaz Rex’s nomination to the Senate on Tuesday, November 10. Díaz Rex is a former federal prosecutor.
Since July it had been known that Díaz Rex was the Trump administration’s favored candidate and was under consideration by the U.S. Department of Justice. Muldrow’s resignation came after he received a call from a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent asking about Díaz Rex’s professional record, according to former prosecutor Osvaldo Carlo. Díaz Rex has worked at the Justice Department’s immigration court in Orlando, Florida.
In a July post on X, Carlo wrote that Muldrow learned he would be replaced when an FBI agent interviewed him about his prospective successor, and that Justice Department officials did not call to inform him. Díaz Rex served as a federal prosecutor in San Juan, where she led the Narcotics Unit and worked on major criminal cases, including the massacre at the La Tómbola business in Sabana Seca, where on October 17, 2009, gunmen killed seven people and a pregnant woman and wounded 17 others.
She is also a member of the military. The nomination would have to go urgently to the Senate Judiciary Committee or win enough bipartisan support to go directly to the Senate floor before the 119th Congress’s session ends in December. In January the Senate changes hands, with Democrats holding a majority that may be 56-44 after the November 3 elections.
Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is in line to be the next Judiciary Committee chair.