WASHINGTON: US President-elect Donald Trump has tapped three senior leaders of his national security and law enforcement teams, choosing Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general, Representative Mike Pompeo as CIA director and General Mike Flynn as national security adviser, a transition official said on Friday.
The transition official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the announcements would be made formally on Friday.
All three men have accepted Trump’s offer, the official said.
In choosing Sessions as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Trump would award a loyalist whose hard-line and at times inflammatory statements on immigration were similar to his own. Sessions opposes any path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and was an enthusiastic backer of Trump’s promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico.
A member of the Senate since 1996, Sessions is known as an outspoken voice against illegal immigration, and in favour of reduced spending and a tough approach to fighting crime.
He was the first senator to endorse Trump during the campaign and is said to have become a close adviser to the real estate tycoon who has no experience in government.
But he is also dogged by racially charged comments he made in the 1980s while working as a prosecutor in Alabama, including allegations he referred to a black subordinate as “boy” and joked about the Ku Klux Klan.
Pompeo, from Kansas, co-authored a report that slammed Trump’s defeated rival Hillary Clinton for her handling of the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya in which the US ambassador and three other Americans died.
It accused the administration, of which Clinton was then secretary of state, of misleading the public over the attack and failing to protect US personnel.
Sessions, 69, a former Alabama attorney-general and US attorney, has received a telephone call offering him the job, according to CBS News.
Bloomberg reported a Trump aide called Senator Ted Cruz, another possible contender for the job, on Thursday night to tell him Sessions would get the position.
Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer, who is involved in the Trump presidential transition, would not confirm the reports on CNN. “Until Donald Trump says it, it’s not official,” Spicer said.
However, Trump’s transition team put out a statement on Thursday praising Sessions after their meeting a day earlier.
“While nothing has been finalised and he is still talking with others as he forms his Cabinet, the president-elect has been unbelievably impressed with Senator Sessions and his phenomenal record as Alabama’s attorney-general and US attorney,” the statement said.
An Army veteran, Sessions is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and chairman of its Strategic Forces Subcommittee.
The 20-year congressional veteran could face resistance as he seeks Senate confirmation.
In 1986, Sessions became only the second nominee in 50 years to be denied confirmation as a federal judge after allegations that he had made racist remarks. Those included testimony that in 1986 he had called an African-American prosecutor “boy,” an allegation Sessions denied.
Sessions said he was not a racist, but said at his hearing that groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and the American Civil Liberties Union could be considered “un-American”.
