Acting Attorney General MattWhitaker is not "legally qualified" to hold down the position until Jeff Sessions' replacement is found, Judge Andrew Napolitano said Thursday.
There’s only three ways a person can become acting attorney general," the Fox News chief legal analyst told "Fox and Friends." "One, if you are the deputy attorney general — Rod Rosenstein — the president signs an executive order and makes you acting."
"Two is if you are already in the Department of Justice and have a job that requires Senate confirmation and you have received confirmation," Napolitano continued. "That is not the case with Matt Whitaker because he’s the chief of staff. That does not require Senate confirmation."
Third, Napolitano said, is that the appointment must be made during a recess appointment for Whitaker to qualify, but the Senate is not in recess.
Whitaker is "absolutely" qualified when it comes to his professional abilities, Napolitano added, but there were "very precise laws" written by Congress after the "Watergate debacle" when late President Richard Nixon had been firing FBI directors.
"It would be a very difficult route (for Trump) to pick his own person to run the DOJ," said Napolitano. Further, said Napolitano, if Whitaker is the acting attorney general, "he is disqualified from being the attorney general."
However, he said that the Trump administration has determined that Whitaker was confirmed about a decade ago, when he became a U.S. Attorney.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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