Trump's Shockingly Unqualified U.S. Attorney Picks - most astonishing -- and chillingly unqualified -- selections

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/opinion/trump-attorney-general.html

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Lately, though, in a less conspicuous way, he’s playing offense as well as defense, naming United States attorneys who will pursue, and even prosecute, his enemies. The Senate will shortly decide whether to confirm three of Mr. Trump’s most astonishing — and chillingly unqualified — selections for these crucial local positions


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The senators will shortly decide, for example, whether to confirm Darin Smith as the chief federal prosecutor in Wyoming. Mr. Smith, who is already the acting U.S. attorney, has acknowledged participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol to overturn President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, though he asserted that he never entered the building. He is a failed candidate for Congress and in a brief tenure as a state senator, he co-sponsored bills to eliminate gun-free zones in buildings and ban state employees from assisting in enforcement of federal firearms laws. Primarily an estate planning specialist, he has practiced law for 25 years without trying a single case in federal or state courts.

When President Trump nominated Phillip Williams Jr. to be U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Alabama, Mr. Williams was the president of “Rightside Media,” a podcast and radio network where he hosted a daily, multi-hour talk show with the tagline, “Solid Conservative and Just Plain Right.” On his program, Mr. Williams argued that the Jan. 6 rioters were “hunted down” by federal law enforcement, whom he accused of “prosecutorial abuse, many, many times over.” He compared these prosecutions to “the Salem witch trials on a national scale.” As a lawyer, Mr. Williams has never tried a criminal case.

The Senate will also soon consider the nomination of Dan Bishop to be the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. Mr. Bishop, who is already acting leader of the office, served in Congress from 2019 to 2025 and voted in 2021 not to certify the presidential election results in two states won by Mr. Biden. As part of Mr. Bishop’s current confirmation process, he answered a question from a Democratic senator about whether “the left” orchestrated the riots on Jan. 6, by saying, in writing, “I have heard credible accounts that black-bloc/Antifa agitators were in the crowd and among the first to vandalize the Capitol building, so I think that leftists participated in and perhaps instigated the mayhem in part.” In his career in private practice, Mr. Bishop estimated that the cases he handled were 97 percent civil and 3 percent criminal.