Matthew Whitaker, chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a former US attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, is expected to succeed Rosenstein as the Justice Department’s No. 2, the New York Times reported Monday. Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia investigation following Sessions’ recusal, was summoned to the White House and is expected to resign or be fired, several outlets have reported.
“If [Mueller] were to continue to investigate the financial relationships without a broadened scope in his appointment, then this would raise serious concerns that the special counsel’s investigation was a mere witch hunt,” Whitaker wrote on CNN.com last August. Before entering government as Sessions’ chief of staff last September, Whitaker was a legal commentator for CNN and appeared several times on network programs to opine on Mueller’s probe and the investigation into Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.