Donald Trump is still looking for the right person to give him legal cover to keep his campaign promises, from deporting millions to pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters.
Despite thinking about possible candidates for months, the incoming president is still agonizing over the position of attorney general—in part because his previous picks didn’t turn out to be the loyalists he was looking for, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported on Tuesday night.
Trump has met with several candidates at Mar-a-Lago, solicited opinions from his inner circle, and made phone calls on the matter, but “No one he’s encountered has checked all the boxes he’s looking for,” Collins said.
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Right now, the Republican president-elect “has no favorites” for what is arguably the second-most powerful job in government, a source told the CNN host.
In 2017, Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, lasted just nine months, after the former Alabama senator recused himself from investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
His next choice, William Barr, dutifully toed the line on the Russia investigations, but the former president turned on him when Barr refused to say the 2020 election had been stolen.
The incoming attorney general will be tasked with helping Trump fulfill his campaign promises to deport up to 11 million undocumented immigrants, unleash the military on American citizens, pardon the rioters convicted of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and retaliate against Trump’s perceived “enemies within.”
Republican lawyer Mike Davis has been auditioning for the role by telling New York Attorney General Letitia James, “We will put your fat a-- in prison.” He also said he wants to drag Democrats’ “dead political bodies through streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall”—figuratively speaking, of course..
Others reportedly on Trump’s short list, like Judge Aileen Cannon, have let their actions speak louder than words. In July, the Florida judge threw out criminal charges against Trump on dubious legal grounds.
No wonder he’s having such a tough time deciding.
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