President-elect Donald Trump on Friday signaled his intention to deliver on his hard-line campaign promises on immigration policy, voting rights, policing and domestic surveillance of Muslims and others suspected of terrorist ties by tapping a trio of staunch conservatives for senior national security roles in his administration.
Trump announced that he plans to nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., as attorney general and Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., as CIA director, while also choosing retired lieutenant general Michael T. Flynn as his White House national security adviser.
Trump’s selections were greeted with widespread applause by his core supporters and other Republicans. But Democrats and civil rights advocates denounced Sessions and Flynn for their controversial records, portending a potentially messy Senate confirmation process for Sessions, a 20-year veteran of the chamber.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is reacting warily to Trump’s nomination of Sessions.
Leahy, who has been the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, noted that the attorney general is the main protector of civil rights and civil liberties in the country, and that “we have a president-elect who has proposed religious tests, a return to torture, and a deportation force that threatens to remove millions of immigrants.
“Sen. Sessions and I have had significant disagreements over the years, particularly on civil rights, voting rights, immigration and criminal justice issues,” Leahy said in a statement. “But unlike Republicans’ practice of unprecedented obstruction of President Obama’s nominees, I believe nominees deserve a full and fair process before the Senate. The American people deserve to learn about Sen. Sessions’ record at the public Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.”
Sessions’ appointment was greeted more favorably by U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., a former state attorney general who narrowly lost her seat to Democrat Maggie Hassan on election day.
“I want to extend my congratulations to Jeff Sessions on his nomination. … I have been honored to work alongside him on the Armed Services and Budget Committees, and as New Hampshire’s former attorney general,” Ayotte said in a statement released on Friday.
The announcements came as Trump is weighing his choices for two of the Cabinet’s highest-profile posts: secretary of state and secretary of defense. He retreated Friday afternoon to his golf club at Bedminster, N.J., where he intends to spend the weekend with working sessions with his staff and visitors, including 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Sessions, 69, was Trump’s first endorser in the Senate and quickly became an influential policy adviser to the GOP nominee. He consistently defended Trump, including after an Access Hollywood video showed Trump bragging about grabbing women by their genitals. Sessions argued Trump’s comments did not describe sexual assault.
Sessions has been dogged by accusations of racism throughout his career. In 1986, he was denied a federal judgeship after former colleagues testified before a Senate committee that he joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he thought they were “OK, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.”
The NAACP wrote in a Twitter message that Sessions’s nomination is “deeply troubling, and supports an old, ugly history where Civil Rights were not regarded as core American values.”
Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., said in a statement, “If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man.”
Senate Republican leaders rallied to Sessions’s defense and said they intended to approve his nomination to lead the Justice Department and serve as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
In a statement, Trump heaped praise on his nominee, celebrating Sessions’s “world-class legal mind” and noting his tenure in Alabama as U.S. attorney and state attorney general. “Jeff is greatly admired by legal scholars and virtually everyone who knows him,” Trump said.
Sessions said in a statement that there was “no greater honor” than to lead the Justice Department.
“I enthusiastically embrace President-elect Trump’s vision for ‘one America,’ and his commitment to equal justice under law,” Sessions said. “I look forward to fulfilling my duties with an unwavering dedication to fairness and impartiality.”
Because of Senate filibuster rule changes, Democrats’ options to derail Sessions’s nomination are limited. To be confirmed, Sessions would need a simple majority in the Republican-controlled chamber.
The president-elect is also scheduled to meet today with Romney, who was a fierce critic of Trump’s candidacy but who is being discussed as a potential candidate for secretary of state.
Other scheduled visitors today include former D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, Chicago Cubs co-owner Todd Ricketts and retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, a plausible defense secretary.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is chairman of Trump’s transition, put a positive spin on Trump’s announced appointments and future selections during a brief visit with reporters on Friday at Trump Tower.
“The president-elect is a man of action, and we’ve got a great number of men and women with great qualifications who look forward to serving in this administration,” Pence said. “Our agency teams arrived in Washington, D.C., this morning, and I am very confident it will be a smooth transition that will serve to lead this country forward.”
After meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday evening, Trump continued his outreach to world leaders on Friday by speaking by phone with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
During the campaign, Trump had said he might reconsider the United States’ commitment to the alliance. But he and Stoltenberg “underlined NATO’s enduring importance” during Friday’s call, according to a statement from a NATO spokeswoman. Stoltenberg invited Trump to Brussels for the NATO summit next year.
As they have all week, potential administration appointees cycled through Trump Tower on Friday for face-to-face meetings with the president-elect, including Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a potential defense secretary candidate, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who is under consideration to be U.S. ambassador to Israel.
Huckabee swatted away questions from reporters about whether he was seeking a position. “My job right now is to listen to the president-elect,” he said. “It’s his job to make the decisions. … The only person giving out jobs in this building is President-elect Donald Trump, not me.”
Trump’s selection of Pompeo to lead the CIA did not spark as much controversy as his choices of Sessions and Flynn.
Pompeo, 52, was elected to the House in 2010 as part of the first wave of tea party lawmakers. A U.S. Military Academy and Harvard Law School graduate, he served as an Army cavalry officer before founding an aerospace company and running an oil-field equipment manufacturing firm. He also has worked as an attorney with the Washington mega-firm Williams and Connolly.
Pompeo serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and is a close ally of Pence. He backed Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., over Trump in the Republican primaries but supported Trump in the general election.
A vocal critic of Obama’s nuclear accord with Iran, Pompeo gained prominence through his role in the congressional investigation into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and assailed former secretary of state Hillary Clinton during the committee’s hearings.
Trump said of Pompeo: “He has served our country with honor and spent his life fighting for the security of our citizens.”
Senate Democrats have pledged a rigorous confirmation review for all of Trump’s nominees — especially Sessions.