Current and former national security officials are raising concerns over Attorney General William Barr's recent decision to remove the head of a Justice Department office that helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal – and replace him with a political appointee with relatively limited experience.
"It's very alarming," said Katrina Mulligan, who worked for the Obama administration in several national security roles and then, after President Donald Trump's inauguration, joined the Office of Law and Policy in the Justice Department's National Security Division.
For much of the past decade, that little-known office has been led by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann, a 23-year career public servant, not a political appointee. But two weeks ago, Wiegmann, 54, was told he is being reassigned and replaced with a political appointee, according to a Justice Department spokesman and sources familiar with the matter.
MORE: Citing concern over leaks, intel community will cease in-person election security briefings to Congress Mulligan and other sources told ABC News that the new head of the office is 36-year-old Kellen Dwyer, a cyber-crimes prosecutor who joined the federal government six years ago and made international headlines in November 2018 when he accidentally revealed that federal charges had been secretly filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Mulligan said that given Dwyer's limited time and experience handling national security matters, he is "a very odd" choice to replace Wiegmann, whom she described as "exceptional" at managing government bureaucracy and resolving "highly contentious matters across the government."
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Matt Olsen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center under the Obama administration, agreed, saying "in and of itself, it's unremarkable" for Wiegmann's position to be filled with a political appointee, but "the concern here is that you have someone who by all accounts has been doing a great job in a very sensitive role … [and] now within really just weeks of the election is replaced with somebody who is viewed more as a partisan."
ABC News pressed the Justice Department spokesman to explain why the personnel change happened at this time, but he declined to answer.
