President-elect Donald Trump has picked the current longest-serving U.S. attorney to be the next deputy attorney general.
Trump chose Rod J. Rosenstein, U.S. attorney for the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, to serve with Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions. Rosenstein, 52, is the only U.S. attorney from the George W. Bush administration who is still in office.
CNN first reported on his nomination on Thursday, and the Washington Post later confirmed it Friday.
From 2001 to 2005, Rosenstein served as principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Tax Division of the Justice Department. President Bush had nominated Rosenstein to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2007, but a Democratically-controlled Senate never held a hearing to confirm him, and his nomination eventually lapsed.
Rosenstein, a Harvard law graduate, first joined the department in 1990 as a trial attorney in the criminal division’s public integrity section. According to CNN, Sessions helped pick Rosenstein.
If confirmed, he would handle day-to-day management of the department’s 11,000 employees. The heads of several agencies, including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, would report to Rosenstein.
