(Updated to include more biographical details)
President Joe Biden on Tuesday nominated a Jackson County, Missouri, prosecutor as the next U.S. attorney in Kansas.
Biden named Kate Brubacher of Fairway to be the top federal prosecutor in Kansas. Her nomination must be confirmed by the Senate.
Over the years, Brubacher has mixed practicing law with work on the welfare needs of other countries such as El Salvador and Liberia.
She’s been a cellist for 18 years and has taught Sunday school at a local Mennonite church in Kansas City.
Brubacher, who was raised in Newton and comes from a Mennonite family, now serves as an assistant prosecuting attorney and director of innovative prosecution solutions for the Jackson County prosecutor’s office.
A 2010 graduate of Yale Law School, Brubacher has worked for the Jackson County prosecutor’s office since 2016.
In 2016, Brubacher led an effort by the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office and the Kansas City Police Department to use data and community involvement to address the city’s violent crime rate.
Brubacher discussed the program in the August 2017 issue of the Innovation Prosecution Solutions Newsletter.
“Prosecutors have a responsibility to not only focus their attention on processing cases presented to them by police,” she said, “but on crime prevention, problem solving, building partnerships with citizens in the community and incorporating the priorities of
citizens into their mission and operations.”
Before joining the prosecutor’s office, she worked in private practice for the Cooley law firm in New York, handling a broad range of cases including investigations involving the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act.
Her work at Cooley at also focused on First Amendment issues for internet companies, securities and accounting fraud litigation, and criminal government investigations into financial markets.
While at the Cooley law firm, she represented CenturyLink in a federal securities class action lawsuit brought on behalf of all purchasers of the company’s stock in 2012 and 2013.
The telecommunications company was accused of falsely representing that it was financially capable of maintaining an “outsized dividend payment” of 7.25% on its stock.
In 2014, she also represented a Virginia distillery in a trademark infringement case over whether it could use the phrase “double barreled” whiskey.
Before moving to the Cooley Law firm, Brubacher worked for Cravath, Swaine and Moore in New York where she defended major investment banks in residential mortgage-backed securities lawsuits with claims totaling $19 billion across multiple state and federal districts.
She also managed regulatory investigations into a bank’s mortgage-backed securities business.
She also researched, drafted and oversaw a project on direct foreign investment in Kenya.
She founded and served as executive director of the Liberian Widows Initiative, which was created to help survivors of the Liberian civil war.
In that role, she partnered with business and nursing classes at Kansas Wesleyan University to connect the curriculum of Kansas students’ the real-life needs in Liberia.
She has a master’s degree in religion with a concentration in ethics from the Yale Divinity School.
And she earned a bachelor’s degree from in philosophy and religious studies with a minor in international relations from Stanford University.
She also has a master’s degree in history from Stanford.
Brubacher also serves on a number of boards, including Bethel College, a Mennonite liberal arts college founded in 1886 in north Newton.
She’s also on the board of directors of the Perkin Foundation, which supports
a feeding program and sustainable farming in El Salvador.
She is a member of the Bethel College Mennonite Church in North Newton and was pre-school Sunday school teacher at Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City.
She’s been a cellist for 18 years and completed two marathons.
