Top DOJ Lawyer, Scott Schools, To Step Down

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Summary: Scott Schools is expected to resign by the end of the week. 

Scott Schools, a top aide to the deputy attorney general, is planning to leave by the end of the week, according to NPR. He will be replaced by Bradley Weinsheimer.

  

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NPR said that Schools, the associate deputy attorney general, has been an important advisor to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and that Schools recommended that last year’s Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe be fired.

McCabe was famously going to retire in March but Trump fired him days before, which made him ineligible to collect his pension. Schools had been instrumental in recommending McCabe’s firing, stating that McCabe lacked candor during an internal investigation concerning President Donald Trump and previously fired FBI Director James Comey.

NPR said that Schools was a “strategic counselor and repository of institutional memory and ethics at the DOJ” and they said that he had a “critical, if behind-the-scenes, role in some of the most important and sensitive issues in the building.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a statement, thanking Schools for his almost 20 years of service to the DOJ.

“Scott Schools has been a fabulous lawyer for the Department of Justice for close to twenty years, rising through the ranks at the Department to become our most senior career attorney,” said Attorney General Sessions. “He has served with distinction in several positions in the Department, including as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, the U.S. Attorney for South Carolina and the Northern District of California, and as an Associate Deputy Attorney General. Scott has provided invaluable leadership and counsel in his years at the Department, and his service is an example to all. He will be greatly missed, and I wish him the best in his future endeavors.”

Besides the Comey recommendation, Schools was well-known for advising former Attorney General Sally Yates before her congressional testimony in 2016. Yates was fired by President Trump in January 2017 after serving for only 10 days because she refused to enforce his travel ban. She was replaced by Sessions.

As an advisor to Rosenstein, Schools also played a critical role in the Russia investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Schools is now the third high-profile Justice Department official to resign recently. His previous supervisor, Rachel Brand, quit earlier this year.

Schools is expected to head to the private sector, and a source told NPR that he was not pushed out of the DOJ or had any problems with department leadership.

Schools will be replaced by Weinsheimer, who has worked for the DOJ for 27 years on homicide and public corruption cases. Weinsheimer will not be involved with the Russia probe.

• Andrew McCabe Gave James Comey Firing Memo to Special Counsel Robert Mueller
• Fired FBI Director James Comey Accuses Trump Administration of Telling Lies 

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