Trump has top DOJ positions as well as U.S. attorney posts and judicial vacancies to fill, but as scandals have spread, the candidate pool has shrunk.
President Donald Trump was already struggling to fill hundreds of top legal jobs throughout the federal government.
Over the past two weeks, that task became exponentially more difficult, according to top GOP lawyers.
Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and the subsequent string of allegations — from Trump demanding a pledge of loyalty from Comey and pressuring him to ease off a probe into his former aide, to revelations that Trump trashed Comey as a “nut job” in an Oval Office meeting with top Russian officials — have narrowed the ranks of people willing to serve.
“They were dealing with a pool that had already shrunk and, now, of course, some people will be avoiding it like the plague,” said one well-connected GOP lawyer who held a top-level post in President George W. Bush’s administration and asked not to be named. “The lesser-known folks are wondering if they’re going to take a huge reputational hit if the president of the United States starts tweeting about them. … There’s definitely some poisoning of the well going on in terms of who would take a job at this point.”
From the outset, the Trump administration was facing a limited pool of candidates for senior positions. Many GOP lawyers and former officials signed “Never Trump” pledges during the campaign and never seriously considered accepting a Trump appointment. Others did, but found themselves essentially blacklisted because of blog posts or other statements made about Trump during the campaign.
Trump still has to fill senior Department of Justice roles and the 93 U.S. attorney posts around the country — a task complicated by his decision, in March, to demand the immediate resignation of all remaining Obama-era appointees without a bench of replacements ready to go. Scores of seats on the federal bench also remain open.
Further complicating the search is the growing demand from the president and many of his top advisers for personal attorneys to advise them as the federal probe expands into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including contacts with Trump friends and campaign staff.
The process has already presented some conflict-of-interest issues. Government lawyers typically have to recuse from inquiries involving their former firm’s clients for one year — and Trump’s decision to tap one of his personal lawyers, Marc Kasowitz, to oversee his outside lawyers working on the Russia-related probes appears to have contributed to the decision by former senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman to step out of the running for the FBI job.
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Trump's Comey and Rosenstein imbroglios prompt GOP lawyers to rethink administration jobs https://t.co/kBmp5v6nVF
— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) May 29, 2017
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