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    Jeffrey Clark Was Considered Unassuming. Then He Plotted With Trump.

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJeffrey Clark Was Considered Unassuming. Then He Plotted With Trump.Justice Department colleagues said they were shocked by Mr. Clark’s embrace of the president’s falsehoods and plan to oust the acting attorney general in an effort to overturn Georgia’s election results.Colleagues said they had seen Jeffrey Clark, who was the head of the Justice Department’s civil division, as an establishment lawyer who was not particularly Trumpist.Credit…Pool photo by Yuri GripasKatie Benner and Jan. 24, 2021, 9:58 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — It was New Year’s Eve, but the Justice Department’s top leaders had little to celebrate as they admonished Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, for repeatedly pushing them to help President Donald J. Trump undo his electoral loss.Huddled in the department’s headquarters, they rebuked him for secretly meeting with Mr. Trump, even as the department had rebuffed the president’s outlandish requests for court filings and special counsels, according to six people with knowledge of the meeting. No official would host a news conference to say that federal fraud investigations cast the results in doubt, they told him. No one would send a letter making such claims to Georgia lawmakers.When the meeting ended not long before midnight, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen thought the matter had been settled, never suspecting that his subordinate would secretly discuss the plan for the letter with Mr. Trump, and very nearly take Mr. Rosen’s job, as part of a plot with the president to wield the department’s power to try to alter the Georgia election outcome.It was clear that night, though, that Mr. Clark — with his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about voting booth hacks and election fraud — was not the establishment lawyer they thought him to be. Some senior department leaders had considered him quiet, hard-working and detail-oriented. Others said they knew nothing about him, so low was his profile. He struck neither his fans in the department nor his detractors as being part of the Trumpist faction of the party, according to interviews.The department’s senior leaders were shocked when Mr. Clark’s machinations came to light. They have spent recent weeks debating how he came to betray Mr. Rosen, his biggest champion at the department, and what blend of ambition and conviction led him to reject the results of the election and embrace Mr. Trump’s claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, including inside the department itself.The plot devised by Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump would have ousted Mr. Rosen and used the Justice Department to pressure lawmakers in Georgia to overturn the state’s election results. But Mr. Trump ultimately decided against firing Mr. Rosen after top department leaders pledged to resign en masse.Mr. Clark declined to comment for this report, but he reiterated his assertion that The New York Times’s account of his conversations with Mr. Trump, first reported on Friday, and his colleagues was inaccurate. He said he could not detail those inaccuracies because of legal privilege issues. And he said all of his official communications “were consistent with law.”“The story kind of shocked me because this is not the Jeff that I know,” said Theodore H. Frank, a friend and former colleague. Credit…Justin T. Gellerson for The New York TimesSome of his friends said that those who told the press about his final days at the Justice Department painted a picture of a man they do not recognize. “The story kind of shocked me because this is not the Jeff that I know,” said Theodore H. Frank, a friend and former colleague. “I know Jeff as a guy who really cares about the rule of law and, you know, just a rumpled, thoughtful lawyer who is an intellectual — not a Machiavellian backstabber.”Mr. Clark had spent two years leading the Justice Department’s environmental division, where he was seen as a standard Republican lawyer political appointee — a member of the conservative Federalist Society with a skepticism of rules that cut into corporate profits.But now, Mr. Clark, 53, has become notorious. A person who has worked closely with Kirkland & Ellis, where Mr. Clark spent most of his career outside two stints in the George W. Bush and Trump Justice Departments, said there appeared to be scant chance that the law firm would rehire him.Friends and critics alike reject the notion that Mr. Clark is an operator, describing him as “nerdy” and “thoughtful.”Mr. Frank, who met Mr. Clark when both worked at Kirkland & Ellis in the 1990s and described himself as a Federalist Society member who voted for President Biden, said he was reserving judgment about the incident. Others were more direct.“This is the first wave of character assassination, of people going after the most effective lawyers in the Trump administration,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who worked with Mr. Clark when she worked at the Environmental Protection Agency in the clean air division and as chief of staff to Andrew R. Wheeler when he was the agency’s administrator. She was struck by the fact that Mr. Clark’s colleagues were so upset and fixated on an event that ultimately did not happen. Mr. Trump, after all, did not replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark or have the Justice Department contact Georgia lawmakers.She said Mr. Clark was most likely discussing with his colleagues and the president “a range of options,” just as he was known for doing in his work advising her agency.Some of Mr. Clark’s associates said he could be pedantic. As a manager, he made no effort to hide when he had little respect for his career subordinates’ opinions.He is not known for being understated on the topic of himself. Where the typical biography on the Justice Department website runs a few paragraphs, Mr. Clark’s includes the elementary school he attended in Philadelphia, a topic he debated in college and that he worked for his college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.After graduating from Harvard in 1989, Mr. Clark earned a master’s degree in urban affairs and public policy from the Biden School of Public Policy at the University of Delaware in 1993 and a law degree from Georgetown University in 1995. He clerked for an appeals court judge, Danny Boggs, who was known for giving prospective clerks quizzes that tested not just their knowledge of the law, but also a range of esoteric trivia.Mr. Clark then worked for Kirkland & Ellis from 1996 to 2001, followed by a stint in the Justice Department’s environmental and natural resources division during the Bush administration, before returning to Kirkland in 2005 as a partner, but not one with an equity stake in the firm, according to a person who worked closely with him at the law firm.He held the title of “non-equity partner,” which meant that he did not share in the firm’s profits or make leadership decisions.When Mr. Clark returned to the Justice Department as the head of the environmental division in 2018, he flew under the radar. Like other Republican officials, he narrowly interpreted the division’s legal authority and had a typically tense relationship with career lawyers when it came to enforcing anti-pollution laws.In one instance, Mr. Clark held up Clean Water Act enforcement cases because of a pending matter before the Supreme Court that career lawyers felt did not directly relate to their work, according to a lawyer with knowledge of those cases. The Supreme Court was hearing a matter that involved discharges that flowed through groundwater before reaching waters regulated by the federal government, and the department was working on a case that involved flows over land.His employees believed that Mr. Clark hoped the court would curtail the law’s reach in a way that would apply to overland spills, too, but by a 6-to-3 ruling, it did not.In a different case, he disagreed with a recommendation that the civil division made to the Office of the Solicitor General, and ultimately got his way after asking the general counsels of other agencies to also push back on the recommendation. Civil division employees said he did not tell them that he would do this, and felt that had circumvented the proper process.Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen had admonished Mr. Clark over his push to help President Donald J. Trump overturn the election.Credit…Ting Shen for The New York TimesWhile Mr. Clark oversaw environmental cases, sometimes working late into the night and personally reviewing briefs, the department’s civil division was in turmoil. Its leader, Jody Hunt, sometimes clashed with the White House Counsel’s Office and, later on, with Attorney General William P. Barr, over how best to defend the administration.Mr. Hunt resigned with no warning in July, leaving his deputy to run the division while Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosen searched for an acting leader among the department’s thinned-out ranks. Mr. Clark wanted the job, which was a considerable step up in stature, and Mr. Rosen supported the idea even though he was already a division head, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.After he took the helm of the civil division in September, colleagues began seeing flashes of unusual behavior. Mr. Clark’s name appeared on eyebrow-raising briefs, including what would turn out to be an unsuccessful effort to inject the government into a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Trump by a woman who has said he raped her more than two decades ago. He also signed onto an attempt to use the Justice Department to sue a former friend of the first lady at the time, Melania Trump, for writing a tell-all memoir.He made clear to lawyers who produced draft briefs that they must spell out his name in full, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, according to a former official.Others said he mounted an idiosyncratic push to remove the word “acting” from his official title — acting assistant attorney general of the civil division — citing an old department legal opinion from the 1980s. Officials denied his request.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting AG

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney GeneralTrying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist, and had the men make their cases to him.Jeffrey Clark, who led the Justice Department’s civil division, had been working with President Donald J. Trump to devise ways to cast doubt on the election results.Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated PressJan. 22, 2021Updated 8:50 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?The answer was unanimous. They would resign.Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He also pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.This account of the department’s final days under Mr. Trump’s leadership is based on interviews with four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.Mr. Clark said that this account contained inaccuracies but did not specify, adding that he could not discuss any conversations with Mr. Trump or Justice Department lawyers. “Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties,” he said. “All my official communications were consistent with law.”Mr. Clark also noted that he was the lead signatory on a Justice Department request last month asking a federal judge to reject a lawsuit that sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election.Mr. Trump declined to comment. An adviser said that Mr. Trump has consistently argued that the justice system should investigate “rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years.”The adviser added that “any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.”A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Rosen. When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm.(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into four federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.Election workers performing a recount in Atlanta in November. Mr. Trump focused on Georgia’s election outcome after he lost the state.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s environmental and natural resources division.As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.Mr. Clark asked Mr. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general.Credit…Ting Shen for The New York TimesEven as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden’s victory, there would be little for them to do until they left along with Mr. Trump in two weeks.They began to exhale days later as the Electoral College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached.Maggie Haberman More

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    Justice Dept. Asks Judge to Toss Election Lawsuit Against Pence

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    Electoral College Results

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    Barr Sees ‘No Reason’ for Special Counsels for Hunter Biden, Election

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarr Sees ‘No Reason’ for Special Counsels for Hunter Biden or the ElectionThe departing attorney general, William P. Barr, again broke with President Trump on his unsupported claims of widespread election fraud and the need to appoint a special counsel to investigate the president-elect’s son.Credit…Pool photo by Michael ReynoldsDec. 21, 2020Updated 9:12 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr distanced himself again from President Trump on Monday, saying he saw no reason to appoint special counsels to oversee the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., or to investigate Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.At a news conference to announce charges in an unrelated terrorism case, Mr. Barr, who is stepping down in two days, said that he did not “see any reason to appoint a special counsel” to oversee the tax investigation into the younger Mr. Biden.“I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Mr. Barr said. “To the extent that there is an investigation, I think that it’s being handled responsibly and professionally.”He also said that he would name a special counsel to oversee an inquiry into election fraud if he felt one were warranted. “But I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Mr. Barr said.After Mr. Trump’s loss to Mr. Biden, the president and his allies have seized on conspiracy theories about election fraud and considered legally questionable actions to cast doubt on the validity of the outcome or even seek to overturn it. Mr. Barr’s statements, in his final days on the job, seemed to signal that there was no appetite at the Justice Department to be drawn into any such efforts.But it is unclear how much pressure Mr. Trump might put on Mr. Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the current deputy attorney general, who will lead the department on an acting basis for the remaining weeks of the president’s term and whose approach to dealing with Mr. Trump is unknown.At a minimum, Mr. Barr’s statements on Monday give Mr. Rosen cover not to appoint special counsels to look into voter fraud or Hunter Biden, and would make the optics of any decision to go ahead with such appointments more difficult for both Mr. Rosen and Mr. Trump.Mr. Rosen has not signaled his specific intentions. But he has held discussions about the ramifications of appointing a special counsel to oversee the investigation into Hunter Biden, according to a person familiar with those conversations who is not authorized to publicly discuss them.He said in an interview with Reuters last week that he would make decisions on all issues, including the potential appointment of a special counsel, “on the basis of the law and the facts.”Mr. Barr’s comments are certain to further poison his relationship with Mr. Trump, who believes that the attorney general should have more forcefully used the Justice Department to attack Mr. Biden and his family in the weeks before the election and to cast doubt on the results after the votes were cast.Long been regarded as Mr. Trump’s most loyal and effective cabinet member, Mr. Barr, a believer in strong presidential power, brought the Justice Department closer to the White House than any attorney general since John Mitchell, who ran President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign and was deeply involved in Watergate.Mr. Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s investigation into the intersection of Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign amounted to a gift to the president. He presented it in the best possible light for Mr. Trump before its public release and ultimately concluded that the president had not obstructed justice, despite his efforts to shut down the inquiry.The Justice Department’s independent inspector general found that the senior officials at the bureau had sufficient reason to open the investigation. A judge later called Mr. Barr’s summary of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, misleading.Convinced that the F.B.I. had overstepped its authority in investigating the Trump campaign, Mr. Barr asked a federal prosecutor, John H. Durham, to look into the origins of the Russia investigation. In October, the attorney general appointed him to be a special counsel with a mandate to continue exploring whether the inquiry was wrongfully opened.Mr. Barr broke with longstanding norms when he spent the months leading up to the election echoing Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots would result in widespread voter fraud. In strikingly political remarks for an attorney general, he later said the country would be “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if the president were not re-elected.He also approved the withdrawal of criminal charges against Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, and overruled prosecutors who requested a long sentencing recommendation for Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s longtime advisers.But his relationship with the president fractured after the election after he said in an interview this month that he had not seen voter fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Tensions between them escalated after it became clear that Mr. Barr had kept the investigation in Mr. Biden’s son under wraps during the presidential race. While it is department policy not to discuss investigations that could affect the outcome of an election, Mr. Trump accused his attorney general of disloyalty for not publicly disclosing the matter during the campaign.With the president growing more furious and his allies constantly attacking Mr. Barr on social media and cable news for his perceived disloyalty, the president said last week that Mr. Barr would depart on Wednesday.Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election have grown more frantic since he announced that Mr. Barr would step down. On Friday, he discussed with aides in the Oval Office about naming Sidney Powell to be a special counsel overseeing a voter fraud inquiry. Ms. Powell, who worked as a lawyer for his campaign, has promoted unfounded conspiracy theories that Venezuela rigged the presidential election using doctored voting machines.Ms. Powell met briefly with Mr. Trump on Monday, a person briefed on their discussion said. Separately, the president met with a group of House Republicans, including Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who is pushing a congressional challenge of electoral votes from a half-dozen battleground states that were won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Brooks said that he and “people with firsthand knowledge of voter fraud” met over the course of several hours with Mr. Trump and others. “All in all, our effort to object to states that have such flawed election systems as to render them untrustworthy is full speed ahead,” Mr. Brooks said.The president has raised the possibility of an executive order to have the Department of Homeland Security seize and examine voting machines for evidence of tampering. His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has also sought to have the department seize the machines, an idea rejected by homeland security officials.On Monday, Mr. Barr said he saw “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government.”White House lawyers have told Mr. Trump that he does not have the authority to take these actions, but his allies have pushed the president not to heed their advice.Now Mr. Rosen will have to contend with the possibility that Mr. Trump will run a parallel pressure campaign on the Justice Department.Mr. Rosen, a longtime corporate lawyer with no experience as a prosecutor, had never worked at the Justice Department before he became Mr. Barr’s top deputy in May 2019. His previous government service includes a stint as general counsel of the Transportation Department and of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, as well as as the No. 2 official of the Transportation Department under Mr. Trump.The question of how far an attorney general can and should go to further Mr. Trump’s political agenda has defined the tenures of both Mr. Barr and his most recent predecessor, Jeff Sessions. But Mr. Rosen will be stepping into the role at a time when the question is as intense as it has ever been.Unlike Mr. Barr and Mr. Sessions, Mr. Rosen does not have a long relationship with the department and no one is sure how much he is inclined to be a check on the president and protect the long-term interests of the department.Mr. Rosen worked largely in Mr. Barr’s shadow at the department. After Mr. Barr announced that he would leave, Mr. Rosen said that he was “honored at the trust and confidence” that Mr. Trump had placed in him to lead the department and that he would “continue to focus the implementation of the department’s key priorities” and maintain “the rule of law.”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Who Is Jeffrey Rosen, Who Will Lead the Justice Dept. for Trump’s Endgame?

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