A legal expert sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump's nomination of a MAGA influencer to lead an obscure but important federal agency.
The president nominated far-right podcaster Paul Ingrassia to head up the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which was set up by Congress after Watergate to protect whistleblowers and other federal workers from unlawful employment practices, as well as enforcing the Hatch Act that forbids political activity in the federal workplace, wrote former prosecutor Barbara McQuade for MSNBC.
"Picking Paul Ingrassia to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel is not like putting the fox in charge of the hen house," McQuade wrote. "It’s more like setting fire to the whole farm."
"The nature of the work demands an experienced investigator who is scrupulously apolitical," she added. "Ingrassia is anything but."
The 30-year-old Ingrassia has been an attorney for only three years and previously worked at the far-right Claremont Institute, where Trump's infamous legal adviser John Eastman came from before hatching the 2020 fake elector scheme. McQuade said the president's nominee was woefully unqualified for this new role.
"Ingrassia doesn’t have the legal experience for the role," she wrote. "But he has something more important, at least for this administration. Early in Trump’s second term, Ingrassia served as the president’s liaison to the Justice Department, where he referred to himself as Trump’s 'eyes and ears,' according to NBC News. He was reassigned to the Department of Homeland Security after he reportedly clashed with DOJ officials by pushing to hire candidates with 'exceptional loyalty' to Trump, reports ABC News."
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He urged Trump to pardon all of the Jan. 6 rioters and called for $1 million in reparations to each of their families, and he advocated for the president to identify all the judges and prosecutors in those cases and call for their resignations, she wrote.
"His views on the Jan. 6 riot are extreme, even by MAGA standards," McQuade wrote. "Ingrassia also urged Congress to make Jan. 6 a national holiday to place 'the day’s events in their proper historical context: as a peaceful protest against a great injustice affecting our electoral system' [and] referred to former Vice President Mike Pence as a traitor who belongs in 'the ninth circle of hell.'"
"All private citizens are entitled to express their opinions, but someone who is either as delusional or sycophantic as Ingrassia is, in my opinion, simply unfit to lead an agency that is tasked with enforcing nonpartisanship," McQuade added.
Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, Joe Biden's appointee as OSC head, in February, and while a court found his dismissal was unlawful, he dropped his legal challenge when an appeals court declined to reinstate him, and the president moved to neuter the agency after its oversight found 13 senior administration officials in his first term had violated the Hatch Act.
"Like the U.S. attorney position, the head of the Office of Special Counsel must be confirmed by the Senate. For the sake of our federal workforce and the important work they do for our country, let’s hope this nomination meets the same fate as [U.S. attorney nominee Ed] Martin’s."
