Trump judicial nominee draws scorn after painful hearing
It was one of the more painful Senate hearings in recent memory.
Matthew S. Petersen, a member of the Federal Election Commission, was one of five of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees being questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday when Sen. John N. Kennedy, R-La., singled him out for an interrogation.
Thus commenced what appeared to be an excruciating five minutes of ignorance on Petersen’s part, as he answered most of Kennedy’s questions in the negative.
No, he had not ever handled a jury trial, or even a bench trial. In fact, he had not handled any civil or criminal trials at all, in either state or federal court.
No, he had never argued a motion in state court.
No, he could not define the Daubert standard, a wellknown standard for admitting expert testimony. Nor could he explain a motion in limine, a formal request to exclude certain kinds of evidence.
Petersen, who practiced election law at a firm before joining the government, and who has been nominated to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, attempted to justify his inability to answer the questions. “I understand that the path that many successful district court judges have taken has been a different one than I’ve taken,” he said.
Toward the end of the hearing, Petersen also came up empty on two lesser-known points of legal doctrine. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
The hearing could have been simply a bad memory for Petersen. But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Judiciary Committee, shared a video of the exchange Thursday evening on Twitter.
He characterized Kennedy’s queries as “basic questions of law” and snarked that Petersen couldn’t “answer a single one. Hoo-boy.”
The clip quickly attracted attention, and criticism, from the legally educated to the less so.
“Don’t want to beat up on the guy but the questions he was being asked could be answered by a second-year law student,” said Aderson Francois, a professor at Georgetown Law School.
“In the past year, I have supported nearly every one of President Trump’s picks, but I don’t blindly support them,” Kennedy said in a statement. “I ask questions that I expect them to be able to answer. In doing so, I’m just doing my job. That’s why we have a Madisonian-inspired separation of powers. We need checks and balances so that we can serve the American people well.”
Petersen is not the first of Trump’s judicial nominees to face criticism for being poorly prepared for the bench. At least two other nominations stalled this week amid similar concerns.
One of those was the nomination of Brett Talley, a lawyer who was nominated for a lifetime federal district judgeship despite never having tried a case.
Talley was the fourth of Trump’s nominees to be rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association and the second to have received the rating unanimously.
Talley failed to disclose that his wife is a senior lawyer in the office of the White House Counsel. And according to Slate, he may have written controversial posts on a message board for fans of the University of Alabama, including one that defended an early incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Kennedy obliquely referred to that report at the end of his questioning, asking whether any of the nominees before him had ever blogged in support of the Ku Klux Klan.
All five said no.