President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions Wednesday afternoon and temporarily elevated his chief of staff, Matt Whitaker.
We are pleased to announce that Matthew G. Whitaker, Chief of Staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice, will become our new Acting Attorney General of the United States. He will serve our Country well….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018
….We thank Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his service, and wish him well! A permanent replacement will be nominated at a later date.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018
Whitaker will now assume control of oversight of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Department of Justice spokeswoman Sarah Flores confirmed Wednesday.
Asked who would oversee Mueller probe now, @SarahFloresDOJ responds: “The Acting Attorney General is in charge of all matters under the purview of the Department of Justice.”
— Mike Warren (@MichaelRWarren) November 7, 2018
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Whitaker spoke extensively about the Mueller investigation prior to joining the Justice Department in June 2017 noting that “Mueller has come up to a red line in the Russia 2016 election-meddling investigation that he is dangerously close to crossing” with respect to investigating the president’s finances.
Whitaker has also tweeted about the Mueller investigation in the past, appearing to disparage the investigation.
2. Whitaker’s tweets about Mueller pic.twitter.com/rGjZxsBE6q
— Yashar Ali ???? (@yashar) November 7, 2018
Whitaker also suggested that one way the Mueller investigation could be reigned is to defund the Mueller investigation saying on CNN in 2017 that in the event Sessions is fired the “attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.”
Whitaker also wrote an op-ed in July 2016 that he would indict former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server, saying:
A reasonable prosecutor may ask, if on numerous occasions, an unknown State Department employee had taken top secret information from a secured system, emailed that information on a Gmail account, and stored the information on a personal server for years, would that individual be prosecuted? I believe they would.