By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he is nominating a federal prosecutor who testified in 2018 in support of her former boss Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court to become a life-tenured judge herself.
Trump in a post on his social media platform Truth Social said he was nominating Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Taibleson in Wisconsin to fill a vacancy on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Republican president said she had “learned from some of the BEST and most HIGHLY RESPECTED Legal Minds in the Country,” after serving as a law clerk to former conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, and Kavanaugh when he was on an intermediate appeals court.
She is Trump’s sixth nominee of his second term to serve on one of the nation’s 13 appeals courts that sit below the Supreme Court. Trump has announced 22 judicial nominations overall since returning to office in January as he seeks to add to the 234 judicial appointments he made in his first term.
Taibleson clerked for Kavanaugh from 2010 to 2011 when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Circuit and testified in 2018 in support of Trump’s decision in his first term to pick him for a seat on the Supreme Court.
The Republican-led Senate confirmed Kavanaugh 50-48 after a grueling confirmation battle in which he faced allegations that became public that he sexually assaulted a woman while in high school, which he denied.
Those allegations became public after Taibleson had appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In her testimony, she highlighted how a majority of the law clerks Kavanaugh hired had been women and, upon hiring them, “goes to bat for us.”
After clerking for Kavanaugh, she then clerked for Scalia and then worked at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis before joining the U.S. Department of Justice.
She served from 2019 to 2022 in the U.S. Office of the Solicitor General and today works in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, according to her LinkedIn profile.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Diane Craft)
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