Acting AG has aired ideas on how to restrict Mueller
The future of the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign was thrown into uncertainty yesterday after President Donald Trump ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions, giving a political loyalist oversight of the probe.
Trump named as acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’ chief of staff, who as a legal commentator last year wrote that special counsel Robert Mueller appeared to be taking his investigation too far.
A Justice Department official said yesterday that Whitaker would assume final decision-making authority over the special counsel probe instead of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Since last year, Rosenstein has overseen the investigation because Sessions, a key Trump surrogate in 2016, recused himself from dealing with matters involving the campaign. It wasn’t immediately clear what role, if any, Rosenstein may play in the probe going forward.
As acting Attorney General, Whitaker could sharply curtail Mueller’s authority, cut his budget or order him to cease lines of inquiry.
Within hours of his appointment, there were mounting calls by congressional Democrats and government watchdog groups for Whitaker to recuse himself, citing critical comments he made about Mueller’s investigation.
Furious Democrats, emboldened by winning control of the House in Wednesday’s elections, also promised to investigate Sessions’ forced resignation and suggested Trump’s actions could amount to obstruction of justice if he intended to disrupt the criminal probe.
Trump’s decision to push Sessions out conflicted with comments he offered during a news conference yesterday when he insisted he had a right to end the investigation but said that he would prefer to “let it go on”. “I could fire everybody right now, but I don’t want to stop it because politically I don’t like stopping it,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace. It should never have been started, because there is no crime.”
Justice Department officials said Whitaker would follow the regular process for reviewing possible ethical conflicts, a process that involves ethics lawyers reviewing an official’s past work to see whether there are any financial or personal conflicts.
Whitaker, a former US attorney in Iowa, once mused as a legal commentator about how a Sessions replacement might reduce Mueller’s budget “so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt”. In August last year he wrote on Twitter that an opinion piece calling the special counsel investigation a “Mueller lynch mob” was “worth a read”. Whitaker also wrote in a column last September that Mueller had “come up to a red line in the Russia 2016 electionmeddling investigation that he is dangerously close to crossing” after CNN reported that Mueller could be looking into Trump and his associates’ financial ties to Russia.
Whitaker has ties to Sam Clovis, who served as Trump’s national campaign chairman and has been interviewed as a witness by Mueller’s investigators about his interactions with foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos. Whitaker chaired Clovis’ campaign for Iowa state treasurer in 2014.
“We’re currently friends,” Clovis said of Whitaker yesterday.
Whitaker has not been confirmed by the Senate and, by law, can serve for only 210 days before he must be replaced by someone who has been confirmed. That period could be extended if Trump nominates a replacement who is not immediately confirmed.