Top aide to deputy attorney general plans to step down: report

A top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is reportedly planning on stepping down from his position. 

NPR reported on Tuesday that Associate Deputy Attorney General Scott Schools will leave the Department of Justice (DOJ). 

{mosads}NPR notes that Schools’s departure comes after he played a critical role in some of the Justice Department’s most important recent decisions. Schools reportedly recommended that then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe be dismissed for his “lack of candor” in an internal probe. 

He also received regular briefings from special counsel Robert Mueller about the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Schools’s decision comes a few months after Rachel Brand stepped down from her position as associate attorney general in February. 

Brand left her postion as the No. 3 official at the DOJ after nine months in order to to become Walmart’s executive vice president of global governance and corporate secretary. 

NPR reports that Schools is leaving for a position in the private sector. A source told the news outlet that there was no sign Schools’s departure came because he was being pushed out. He’ll be replaced by Bradley Weinsheimer, who currently works in the national security unit.