Meet the 30-Year-Old Far-Right Provocateur Nominated by Trump to Investigate Jack Smith
Paul Ingrassia, who has defended Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate and was only admitted to the bar last year, is Donald Trump's nominee to run the all-important Office of Special Counsel.
To grasp how Donald Trump is degrading the caliber of the US government, consider his deployment of a young man named Paul Ingrassia.
Ingrassia is 30 years old. He graduated from law school three years ago.
He was admitted to the New York bar last year, but “lawyer” is not the way to think about what he does. Ingrassia is a far-right provocateur, best known for his former podcast, which published a post calling for martial law in 2020; his support for antisemitic Holocaust-denying extremists such as Nick Fuentes; his participation on the legal team of “manosphere” influencer and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, who denies any wrongdoing; his tweet calling former Vice President Mike Pence a “traitor” who belongs in the “ninth circuit of hell”; and his false but Trump-pleasing assertion that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was ineligible to run for president in 2024.
“She should be deported if you ask me,” Ingrassia declared in late 2023.
For this record, Trump has nominated Ingrassia to run the Office of Special Counsel. That’s right: the president is asking the US Senate to place this bigoted zealot in charge of the independent legal agency tasked with protecting federal whistleblowers and enforcing prohibitions on political activity by government employees.
It says a lot about Ingrassia’s qualifications and fitness for this job that the Republican Senate committee considering the nomination postponed a committee confirmation hearing more than 10 days ago. Pliant Republican senators have confirmed nearly all Trump nominees so far.
But everything about this situation demonstrates how Trump has trashed the functioning and character of the workforce charged with enforcing the laws and protecting the interests of more than 340 million Americans.