John Stafford is an American politician and member of the Republican party from Maryland. He was the Chief Administrative Law Judge for the U.S. Department of the Interior in the first Reagan administration and was a candidate for Senate District 21 in the Maryland congressional elections, 2006. Biography John Stafford was born December 18, 1940, to a United States Marine Corps family at Parris Island, South Carolina. His paternal ancestors were Irish Catholic migrants from County Wexford, and claim links to the Dukes of Buckingham. His maternal ancestors were from Sweden and Bohemia. Stafford was educated at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1961, he represented the Student Government Association (S.G.A.) on the Campus Chest Committee which oversaw the charity projects of student organizations. He also served on the Calendar Committee for the S.G.A. in that year. Now-U.S. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was elected VP on that same ballot. He was a member of Omicron Delta Kappa, in 1962 and 1963. Stafford contributed to many of the University of Maryland's media publications. He worked for the daily newspaper, Diamondback, in 1961 and he wrote the column "Cloakroom Caucus". He started working for the M-Book in 1961 and became editor-in-chief in 1962. He also worked on the yearbook, Terrapin in 1961, representing the Men's Dorms. He was a DJ for four years on WMUC with his four-hour evening show every Sunday. The show played pop and folk, and early R&B songs on 45s and LPs of those earliest singers, most of whom are now in the R&B Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Stafford met and knew many of those early pioneer artists—Ruthie Brown, The Platters, The Drifters, etc.—personally, from the Casino Royale in downtown DC in the 1950s. He served four years in the US Marine Corps as a lawyer during the Vietnam War. His cases as a prosecutor and defense counsel at Cherry Pt. MCAS and NAVARA and the Navy JAG Investigations Division included three of the most important cases arising during that war. The case of US v. Denzil Allen was the first torture and mass murder and atrocity case of the Vietnam war, nine months before My Lai. The case of US v. David Y. Przybycien led to setting the limit on how long a serviceman may be detained before trial at 90 days, or charges must be dismissed. Stafford represented Przybycien in his appeal. That