A conservative lawyer dismissed Donald Trump's insistence on installing political appointees who haven't been properly vetted.
The president-elect has threatened to sidestep the Senate confirmation process by installing nominees during congressional recesses, and some of his advisers have urged him to skip FBI background checks in favor of private security firms. But conservative attorney Gregg Nunziata said that would be unwise and would violate the founders' intentions.
"I believe the president is entitled to have appointees who share his worldview, and he won the election, but what he's not entitled to have is appointees who don't have the character and the judgment to wield the responsibilities of the office to which they have been appointed," said Nunziata, executive director for the Society for the Rule of Law.
"This is the whole purpose of the Senate confirmation process. The founders set it up to make sure that a president cannot install unqualified loyalists into positions at his pleasure, cannot put the trust and faith of the American people and the powers of this government in the hands of people who cannot be counted on to wield that power responsibly, so that's the point of this whole process and the FBI review."
Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader until Jan. 3, called on incoming majority leader Sen. John Thune (R- SD) to adhere to standard FBI background checks for Trump nominees, and Nunziata dismissed arguments by the president-elect allies about skipping that vetting process.
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"It's not about FBI approval," Nunziata said. "It's about the Senate having an informed basis on which to render its judgment on confirmation."
Noah Bookbinder, the president of the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said private vetting was inappropriate and insufficient.
"With a private vetting company, first of all, we don't know who that is," Bookbinder said, "and we don't know what their qualifications are. But more importantly, we don't know if they are going to be consistent and thorough in the way that they review those nominees, and what that throws away is this long established Senate process that Gregg and I were a part of in a bipartisan way, where the Senate Judiciary Committee would receive these FBI background checks, would know what to look for, would follow up if there were gaps or things that that required further investigation so that the Senate would have all the information it would need to make sure that these nominees were appropriate people to serve the American people."
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