With less than one week remaining until President Trump is scheduled to pick a Supreme Court nominee, Trump adviser Leonard Leo told the Washington Examiner the selection process has not yielded a fixed number of finalists.
Leo, who is advising Trump on how to fill the vacancy, warned against viewing the handful of finalists generating the most discussion in legal and political circles as the only options on the president’s lists of 21 potential candidates.
“I don’t think that it’s a good idea to view the process as closed in terms of the number of people who are finalists quite yet,” Leo told the Washington Examiner on Thursday. “My experience with these things is it’s a very fluid and dynamic process and until the very end of that process when the president makes the decision as to who it ought to be, this process can change and move in lots of different directions.”
“Sometimes that’s just a matter of the president’s preferences and how he’s comparing different people, but sometimes it’s also that people just drop out as a natural course of things. It could be that something comes up in their background it could be they or their family members decide this isn’t something that they want to do.”
Three candidates garnering the most attention in legal and political circles this week include 10th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neil Gorsuch, 3rd Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman, and 11th Circuit Judge William Pryor.
Leo pointed to how Trump filled his Cabinet positions and noted that it has not been unusual to interview two or three people after supposedly narrowing his list down to a different few people.
