Washington: President Donald Trump appointed Dana J. Boente, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, to be acting attorney general Monday night after he dismissed Sally Yates from that role over her refusal to defend his executive order on immigration in court. The abrupt dismissal of Yates and the appointment of Boente were the latest twists in a fast-moving crisis over the executive order. Boente is expected to serve as acting attorney general until Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, is confirmed. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on his nomination as soon as Tuesday, which means Boente may be in his new role for a only matter of days.
So, who is Boente?
Boente, 62, has worked for the Justice Department since 1984 under Republican and Democratic administrations. He served in the department’s tax division and held several positions in the Eastern District of Virginia. He also served as US attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana from December 2012 to September 2013.
In October 2015, Boente was nominated by President Barack Obama to be US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and was confirmed by the US Senate that December.
The district sprawls across a wide swath of the state. It covers 6 million people and often handles cases that touch on national security because its territory includes facilities like the Pentagon and the headquarters of the CIA.
Before joining the Justice Department, Boente clerked for a chief US district judge, J. Waldo Ackerman, in the Central District of Illinois in 1982.
Boente may have become acting attorney general amid turmoil centred on the new Republican president, but he has been praised by members of both parties during his career.
Former Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch affectionately praised Boente last February when he was sworn in as USattorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
She called him one of the Justice Department’s “consummate utility players” and pointed to a string of public corruption prosecutions he led in Virginia and Louisiana. He oversaw the prosecution of former Gov. Robert F. McDonnell of Virginia, a Republican whose conviction was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, and of former US Rep. William J. Jefferson and former Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans, both Louisiana Democrats.
“He is that reliable middle child, the one you could always count on to be there for you,” Lynch said, according to The Washington Post.
Trump appears to have found Boente to be similarly reliable.
Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, said Boente had no hesitation about accepting the acting attorney general’s job, given his “seniority and loyalty” to the department.
Stueve also said Boente told the White House he was willing to do something that Yates would not: sign off on Trump’s executive order.
In an interview with The Washington Post on Monday night, Boente pointed out that his office had been defending the president’s executive order against a lawsuit brought in a Virginia federal court.
“I was enforcing it this afternoon,” Boente told The Post. “Our career department employees were defending the action in court, and I expect that’s what they’ll do tomorrow, appropriately and properly.”
Indeed, shortly before midnight Monday, Boente rescinded the guidance Yates had given department lawyers earlier in the evening and formally ordered them to defend the president’s immigration ban.
