Moments before President-elect Donald Trump announced his replacement pick for attorney general, a legal analyst said she expected him to select a "bomb-thrower."
The collapse of Matt Gaetz’s nomination had Trump on the hunt for the country’s next attorney general – and that person was likely to be cut from the same cloth as the former Republican lawmaker who grew a reputation as a Washington rabble-rouser.
With Trump intent on installing loyalists within the Justice Department who share his vision of disrupting the status quo, it wasn't likely he'd back off from selecting another nominee who had no problem being a firebrand in the position, according to CNN legal analyst Lauren Tomlinson.
“I believe that his next nominee will also be a bomb thrower,” Tomlinson said Thursday. “I don't think he's going to back off of this at all. He’s going to pick someone who he believes is loyal to his vision, who also believes that they need to shake up Washington and will go out there and do it.”
Tomlinson told Wolf Blitzer on his show “The Situation Room” that Trump based his process of selecting nominees for his second administration on lessons he learned during his previous term.
“That is a very big lesson that he learned in the first administration, is that he leaned on what he considers the Republican establishment to pick out some of these nominees, because he wasn't expecting to win, right,” Tomlinson said. “Then he ended up with a cabinet of people he didn't trust, and he didn't believe was fully executing his vision.”
She added that the Justice Department in particular is an agency where the incoming president wants a loyalist aligned with his belief of rooting out the corruption of the FBI.
Her remarks came less than an hour before Trump announced Pam Bondi — a Trump loyalist who represented him during his first impeachment — as his nominee for attorney general.
Ashley Etienne, former communications director for Vice President Harris, said during the discussion that the Justice Department has historically operated independently from the White House under both political parties, but added that Trump would change that.
“That's how we function, so what Trump is going to do is break that tradition and really not only gut out the agency, but use it to weaponize it against his own political enemies,” she said.
Watch the clip below or at this link.