Outgoing U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan, whose tenure is defined by the high-profile federal investigations into Georgia’s prisons and the Fulton County Jail, is stepping down from the state’s most prominent federal law post on Sunday — a day before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office.
And while Buchanan won’t speculate on who will be appointed as his replacement, he said he’s confident in the future of the office’s work in the Northern District of Georgia, one of three federal court districts in the state.
Nearly three years have passed since Buchanan was sworn in as President Joe Biden’s appointee to head the Atlanta office. His departure is typical of the job, as new administrations seek to place their own appointees.
Trump has not announced who will replace Buchanan, whose job includes overseeing an office of 250 attorneys, investigators and other staff tasked with enforcing federal law in Atlanta and surrounding areas.
In an interview Tuesday with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Buchanan seemed to be taking the long view. He said he believes the office’s mission rises above the turnover of its various appointees, and he views himself as another figure in a lineage that includes U.S. attorneys such as Larry Thompson and Sally Yates, both of whom served as Deputy Attorney Generals under President George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively.
“The work of this office and the people who have been here for decades has always been going,” Buchanan said. “I view my time simply as having grabbed the baton and ran it around the track a couple of times.”
Seated in his office in the Richard B. Russell Federal Building overseeing Mercedes-Benz Stadium and the Gulch, Buchanan is looking back — not just over his appointment, but the history of the department. He mentions the founding of the U.S. Department of Justice, which was created in 1870 and tasked with shepherding the country through the Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War by protecting the rights of newly freed slaves. For Buchanan, a Black man whose family spans Alabama and Georgia, that mission always stuck with him.
“My ancestors, when they received freedom, didn’t go anywhere,” Buchanan said. “The department’s first mission encompassed protecting people who are in my lineage, of my family, and so that’s always meant a lot to me.”
Buchanan’s tenure may well be best remembered for his office’s civil rights work. During his tenure, the DOJ conducted two high-profile investigations into the Fulton County Jail and Georgia’s prison system. The probes outlined cases of horrific violence and abhorrent conditions within the county jail and the state’s prisons.
The DOJ, Fulton County and Fulton Sheriff Patrick Labat entered into a consent decree this month, which will appoint an independent monitor to hold the county accountable as it seeks to address the unconstitutional conditions outlined by federal investigators. No such agreement has yet to be reached with the Georgia Department of Corrections.
His office also prosecuted Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill, who was convicted in October 2022 of violating the civil rights of inmates by ordering that they be strapped into restraint chairs. Hill was sentenced to over a year in prison.
Much of this work was performed by the Northern District of Georgia’s Public Integrity and Civil Rights Section, a specialized unit formalized under Buchanan. He said he hopes creating a specialized unit makes its work more resilient as appointees come and go while building subject-matter expertise among its attorneys.
It is not lost on Buchanan that while his office has been critical of local jails and prisons, as prosecutors they also help send people away. But he does not see those two roles as necessarily contradictory.
“We understand the nuance. We understand the unique position that we’re in,” Buchanan said. “But we also understand that as an entity, a citizen of this community that is charged with keeping people safe, that our responsibilities extend to those who have been detained or committed to a custodial sentence.”
Buchanan first joined the DOJ as a prosecutor in 2010 and was working in the office under his predecessor Byung “BJay” Pak, a former Republican legislator appointed by then-President Donald Trump. Pak stepped down in 2021 in the waning days of the Trump presidency, rather than meet demands from the White House to investigate false claims of widespread voter fraud in Georgia.
On the recommendation of Georgia U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, Buchanan was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and assumed office in May 2022.
Buchanan said he is looking forward to some free time in the coming months and will likely return to private practice. “I‘m just fortunate that I’ve had an opportunity to sit at this desk and to lead this office at what was an important time,” he said.
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