The White House has picked a top Justice Department lawyer to serve as the new general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, according to two senior administration officials.
Patrick Hovakimian, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, will be nominated to ODNI to serve as the intelligence community’s top lawyer, according to the officials. In his current role, he advises Rosen and Attorney General Bill Barr on department operations, policy and specific cases.
He also works closely with Rosen on matters that come before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and other counterterrorism and counterintelligence issues, including sitting in when the FBI briefs him. He also played an instrumental role in DOJ’s handling of last December’s shooting by Saudi students at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fa.
From October 2018 to May 2019, he was DOJ’s director of counter transnational organized crime, where he helped coordinate department policy on the issue and worked closely with Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and intelligence agencies that work on fighting such crime. Hovakimian has been Senate-confirmed before; he’s a commissioner of the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the U.S., and is expected to continue in that role.
Brad Brooker currently serves as ODNI’s acting general counsel. He temporarily stepped into the role in March, after former general counsel Jason Klitenic left to return to the private sector.
Last September, Klitenic briefly got wrapped up in the early stages of President Donald Trump’s impeachment probe when he consulted with the Justice Department and decided that a whistleblower complaint that ODNI’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, had deemed “urgent” should not be provided to Congress. Atkinson was fired by Trump last month.
With the Senate returning to Washington on Monday, Trump’s nominee to be DNI, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), is expected to get a hearing on Tuesday from the Senate Intelligence Committee. If confirmed, Ratcliffe would replace acting DNI Richard Grenell, who’s also the U.S. ambassador to Germany.
Hovakimian started working in 2014 as assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, where he was the co-lead counsel on the “Fat Leonard” case, a major multinational bribery and fraud in East Asia, where he got a lot of experience working with the Department of Defense. He also helped coordinate law enforcement operations and investigations overseas in that role.
When he went to Washington to work for the Trump administration, Hovakimian worked as senior counsel to then-Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand. He attended Stanford Law School and also got a masters degree in political theory from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall scholar. He received a bachelor’s degree in politics from Occidental College, graduating summa cum laude.
According to documents previously submitted for his Senate confirmation, Hovakimian is a Federalist Society member and lifelong Republican who volunteered for the McCain and Romney presidential campaigns.
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Trump to tap DOJ lawyer as ODNI general counsel - POLITICO
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