Is Rachel Brand about to become the most powerful woman (and hated depending on how she reacts) in DC. Hey everyone in the spotlight has a love/hate relationship with DC, just ask Justice Roberts – PB/TK
The Obscure Lawyer Who Might Become the Most Powerful Woman in Washington – By Phillip Shenon / June 16 2017
For someone on the job barely a month, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand was already facing plenty of incoming fire from her critics. Her big problem now: Her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, could soon be among them.
Senate Democrats who opposed her nomination to the No. 3 job at the Justice Department said her legal career reflected a tendency always to support Big Business against the little guy, and they questioned her commitment to civil liberties during her years in the department under President George W. Bush. She has a “heavily skewed pro-corporate agenda,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat. The 44-year-old Brand was confirmed to her job on a party-line Senate vote of 52 to 46. Compare that to the overwhelmingly bipartisan 94 to 6 vote for the No. 2 official in the department, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
And now, the Michigan-born, Iowa-raised Brand, the daughter and granddaughter of Dutch dairy farmers, faces the prospect of scrutiny—and criticism—on a scale that few Washington officials could ever imagine.
Suddenly under attack himself by Trump, Rosenstein has suggested he is on the verge of recusing himself from supervision of the investigation led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, whose pursuit of allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign has apparently enraged the president. On Friday, Trump suggested his relationship with Rosenstein—who named Mueller to the special counsel job—was at a breaking point. “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!” Trump tweeted. “Witch Hunt.” The tweet came the morning after Rosenstein released a cryptic statement urging Americans to be skeptical of reports sourced to anonymous officials.
Continue to politico.com article: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/16/justice-department-rachel-brand-215270
