WASHINGTON – The Senate inched forward Thursday with its plans to confirm U.S. attorney nominees who have no prosecutorial experience and who have fueled lies about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from Donald Trump, raising concerns that they’ve been tapped for these jobs to go after Trump’s political enemies.

Senators held a procedural vote for beginning debate on a package of more than a dozen of Trump’s nominations to federal attorney posts. Their action starts the clock on up to 30 hours of debate, after which senators will hold more procedural votes and, ultimately, a confirmation vote on the entire package.

U.S. attorney nominees don’t usually face as much public scrutiny as a president’s judicial nominees. Their posts only last as long as a president’s term, versus lifetime appointments, and their work is limited to the state in which their office is based.

But these are powerful roles, as these people decide who to prosecute with the full force of the federal government, and on what grounds. And in the Senate’s batch of nominees, there are some disturbing, if not outright unqualified, people on their way to being confirmed to these posts.

Darin Smith, Trump’s pick for U.S. Attorney for the District of Wyoming, is already the acting attorney in this role. A former Republican state legislator, he took part in the protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — though he said he didn’t enter the building — when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in search of lawmakers to potentially kill to stop them from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.

As Jeffrey Toobin, a New York Times opinion writer and former assistant U.S. attorney, noted this week in his piece on the subject, Smith, whose background is primarily in estate planning, has practiced law for 25 years but hasn’t tried a single case in federal or state courts.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) brought up Smith on the Senate floor earlier Thursday, saying he embodies why Trump is so unpopular in polls right now.

“Smith was present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and now Trump wants him to uphold law and order,” Schumer said. “What hypocrisy. What fakery. How disgusting. Donald Trump, you reach a new low every day.”

Another nominee in the mix is Phillip Williams, who is up for a U.S. attorney post in the Northern District of Alabama. Like Smith, he’s never tried a criminal case. He previously criticized federal law enforcement for having “hunted down” Jan. 6 rioters, and accused them of “prosecutorial abuse, many, many times over.” He also compared their prosecutions to the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, when people were falsely accused of witchcraft.

Williams, who previously led a conservative radio network known as Rightside Media, has also described abortion as “nothing more than industrialized slaughter.”

Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman, is also up for a U.S. attorney post in North Carolina. He previously voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and has suggested “the left” participated in and even instigated the violence on Jan. 6.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which U.S. attorney nominees have to clear before heading to the Senate floor, told HuffPost this batch of nominees is “particularly egregious” because of their actions around Jan. 6.

“I have voted against all of the U.S. attorney nominees because none of them has shown me that they will stand up to Donald Trump and the Department of Justice that has been weaponized to go after his political adversaries,” said Blumenthal, who is a former U.S. attorney himself.

“They’ve been chosen to be tools for the ‘Department of Injustice,’” he said. “I am just angry, embarrassed, ashamed about this department.”

Republicans control the Senate, and none have publicly expressed concerns about anyone in this package of nominees. They will almost certainly vote to pass this package once they clear some more procedural steps; the Senate left Thursday for a recess through May 11, so these U.S. attorney nominees won’t be confirmed until sometime after that.

The question is whether GOP senators even know who they’re voting for — there are more than four dozen nominees to various administration posts in this package, including the U.S. attorney nominees — and whether they have any concerns about those nominees’ qualifications or potential political agendas.

They all but shrugged when HuffPost asked them.

“I assume all that’s gonna be vetted” on the Senate floor during the 30 hours of debate time, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told HuffPost.

“I think that will be plenty of time for those issues to be vetted,” said Cornyn, who is also a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former attorney general of Texas.

Asked if he had concerns about any of the U.S. attorney nominees in the package, the Texas senator said nothing as he walked away.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he knows Bishop personally, as they’ve both been GOP politicians in North Carolina. Tillis has also stood out in his party for refusing to support any Trump nominees who have defended the Jan. 6 insurrection or had any part in it.

But Tillis defended Bishop, whose vote to overturn the 2020 election was based on the same lie that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection, and called it “believable” that progressives may have also been in the mix of Trump fanatics that day, fueling violence.

“To speculate that liberal people were in the crowd trying to foment hate, absolutely believable,” he told HuffPost. “But they by themselves did not cause Jan. 6, which is why that didn’t become a disqualifying statement for Mr. Bishop.”

As for potential concerns about other U.S. attorney nominees in the Senate package, like Smith in Wyoming, Tillis said he’d heard about him. But because Smith wouldn’t be posted up in North Carolina, he didn’t seem to care whether his nomination advances or not.

“If you want somebody like that presiding over cases solely in that state, knock yourself out,” said the North Carolina senator. “They want ’em, they can have ’em.”

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