President Donald Trump on Thursday nominated Paul Ingrassia, a 30-year-old former right-wing podcast host, to head the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency in charge of protecting government whistleblowers and enforcing ethics rules.
Ingrassia’s brief tenure in the Trump administration began earlier this year with a liaison role between the White House and Justice Department, including attending the release of some Capitol rioters in January. He was reportedly reassigned after clashing with another official over “loyalty” to Trump and currently serves as the White House’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
For several years, Ingrassia hosted a podcast with his sister, Olivia Ingrassia, called “Right on Point,” which featured discussions with right-wing political commentators and appears to have ended in June 2020.
Pete Kiehart for The Washington Post via Getty Images
A Twitter account promoting the podcast, however, tweeted on: In December 2020, amid Trump’s increasingly desperate battle to cling to the office of the presidency, the account posted that it was “time” for Trump to “declare martial law and secure his re-election.”
The same month, the account said that “secession is the ONLY option for true Americans” if Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election failed.
“Support martial law,” the account tweeted at another point.
CNN’s KFile was first to report on the alarming history of Paul Ingrassia’s podcast in February.
In his Truth Social announcement, Trump praised Ingrassia as a “highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar” with a law degree from Cornell.
If confirmed by the Senate, Ingrassia would lead the Office of Special Counsel that was recently vacated by President Joe Biden appointee Hampton Dellinger.
Trump quietly fired Dellinger just days after returning to the White House.
The move kicked off a legal battle that led Dellinger to be temporarily reinstated before an appeals court sided with Trump on the firing, ending Dellinger’s nascent investigations into the abrupt firings of thousands of federal government employees.
The OSC is not related to the individual special counsels that investigated Trump’s links to Russian interference in the 2016 election, his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and other alleged crimes — although it has a similar name.