[5] In 2001, he was nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, and subsequently confirmed by the United States Senate on September 21, 2001.

[6] During his FISC tenure, Judge Walton was "exceptionally concerned" about the NSA's "flagrant violation" of the court orders regarding privacy, and he accused the agency of "misinterpretations.

[7] In fall 2005, the judge was driving his wife and daughter to the airport for a vacation when he came across an assailant attacking a cab driver on the side of the road.

Pre-trial prosecutors brought a motion of conflict of interest against defense attorney Rusty Hardin for having briefly represented Andy Pettitte, who was an important witness for the government.

The judge said Clemens could not be assured a fair trial after prosecutors showed jurors evidence against his orders in the second day of testimony.

[16] On October 4, 2016, Walton rejected the release of Hillary Clinton criminal indictment drafts prosecutors prepared, but never issued, during the Whitewater investigation in the 1990s.

[17][18] Walton presided over Mohammon v. Bush, a set of amalgamated habeas corpus petitions, submitted on behalf of Guantanamo captives.

[22]On August 21, 2009, Reuters reported that Walton issued a ruling about "hearsay evidence" that applied to all the Guantanamo detainees' habeas petitions before him.

The court's only point is that otherwise unreliable hearsay cannot be deemed reliable because there is other unreliable hearsay to the same effect.On August 5, 2019, Politico reported that while hearing arguments regarding lawsuits by BuzzFeed and the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, as they sought to reveal the approximately 1,000 redacted items in the publicly-released edition of former special counsel Robert Mueller's report, Walton indicated that he would review the redactions before determining whether to make them public.

[25] On October 6, 2020, President Trump, referencing the Mueller report, tweeted "I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax”.