President Trump withdrew his nomination of a controversial former U.S. attorney to become a top official at the Treasury Department.
Jessie Liu, 46, had been Trump’s pick for undersecretary for terrorism and financial crimes, but Axios reported Tuesday her nomination had been pulled. A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination was just two days away.
Liu was U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, but after getting nominated to the Treasury Department, Attorney General William Barr picked his senior counselor, Timothy Shea, to be the acting U.S. attorney in D.C.
Last March, Liu withdrew from consideration to become the No. 3 official at the Justice Department after conservative members of the Senate Judiciary Committee objected to her nomination because of her past membership in a group that opposed Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination to the high court and concerns about her stance on abortion rights. She would have been the second woman and the first Asian American to occupy the position, which was held from 1981 to 1983 by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
In the more than two years as D.C.’s top prosecutor, Liu led more than 300 prosecutors in the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s office. She took part in several controversial investigations, including the cases against Trump campaign associates Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and others stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Earlier in the evening Tuesday, the Justice Department reversed course on a lengthy sentencing recommendation for Stone, a longtime GOP operative, after Trump complained it was too harsh. All four prosecutors in the case abruptly quit after the department backed away from their recommendation.
The U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. under Liu’s leadership recently faced renewed scrutiny by critics who believed she was working against the president. She had been overseeing the criminal investigation into former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired in 2018 after the DOJ inspector general found he lied to investigators. The case has been in limbo despite a judge’s protestation. Liu also was head of the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
“She has hired some assistant U.S. attorneys who are venomously hostile to Trump and his views of justice in the last year. It makes me wonder what is going on there,” Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney during the Bush and Obama administrations who now serves as the president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
Before her nomination was withdrawn, Sen. Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, told the Washington Examiner he considered Liu to be a “top-notch” candidate and planned on supporting her candidacy for the Treasury Department post. Other members on the committee would not immediately comment.
