At just 30 years old, Paul Ingrassia stands to be one of the youngest, Senate-confirmed government officials in recent memory after President Trump announced his intention to nominate him to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

If confirmed by the Senate, the special counsel role will be the latest step in Mr. Ingrassia’s heretofore brief but colorful career as a conservative attorney whose clients include the controversial social media personality Andrew Tate. He’s also been fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump.

On Truth Social, Mr. Trump hailed Mr. Ingrassia as “a highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar, who has done a tremendous job serving as my White House Liaison for Homeland Security.”

The Office of Special Counsel, which Mr. Ingrassia has been tapped to lead, is charged with protecting federal government whistleblowers and investigating and prosecuting so-called “prohibited personnel practices,” which include discrimination and retaliation in the workplace. 

The office, which is not part of the Justice Department, is supposed to be nonpartisan, with its chief traditionally serving a five-year term. But the office was tainted by accusations of partisanship during the Biden Administration, regarding Hunter Biden.

Congressional Republicans accused the Office of Special Counsel a year ago, in June 2024, of not protecting the IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who said they were retaliated against for objecting to preferential treatment given to Hunter Biden.

Mr. Ingrassia’s most recent Senate-confirmed predecessor, Biden appointee Hampton Dellinger, the son of President Clinton’s acting solicitor general, Walter Dellinger, is liberal legal royalty who was dogged by suspicions about his professional ties to Hunter Biden, with whom he had worked at a white-shoe law firm while Hunter Biden was doing work for Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm. 

Mr. Trump, upon his return to power, fired Mr. Dellinger, who sued to keep his job. He was briefly able to remain in situ, but was eventually removed after an appellate court ruled against him in March.

Mr. Ingrassia is younger than and lacks the long resumes of Mr. Dellinger and other lawyers who have led the Office of Special Counsel. 

Mr. Trump’s special counsel of the OSC between 2017 and 2023, Henry Kerner, spent 18 years as a prosecutor in Compton, California. Mr. Kerner’s predecessor, Carolyn N. Lerner, had launched her own civil rights firm Heller, Huron, Chertkof, Lerner, Simon & Salzman, in 1996 – some 15 years before she was appointed special counsel by then-President Barack Obama.

Mr. Ingrassia graduated from Fordham in 2017 and enrolled in Cornell Law School two years later. In 2020, as the senior online editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Mr. Ingrassia wrote critically of Big Tech companies like Amazon that now exert a sovereign-like power similar to that of a government institution, which could “unleash seismic economic and political shockwaves across society.”

“In the age of the symbiotic ‘public-private partnership,’ where massive corporations work hand-in-hand with the federal government in pursuit of a common goal, it is not unthinkable that in an era of extreme partisanship, political antipathies may someday exploit financial capital for revenge, where one party could punish its opponent utilizing the gears of corporate power on a whim,” Mr. Ingrassia wrote. 

In “Rethinking Originalism,” Mr.  Ingrassia argued for natural law jurisprudence, instead of the “logical incoherency” of originalism, to serve as the foundation for conservative constitutional interpretation. 

“Ultimately, the goal of conservative jurisprudence should be to discover the best theory of objective truth that is compatible with the Constitution, and anchor itself to that theory. If the Constitution is intrinsically anathema to conservatism, then either the Constitution—or conservatism—should be ditched,” he wrote.

It was around that same time when Mr. Ingrassia co-hosted with his sister, Olivia Ingrassia, “Right on Point,” a podcast that “celebrates the best of the conservative tradition” and is “indebted to the timeless ideas of Buckley, Kirk, and others,” according to its Spotify page. 

Mr. Ingrassia appears to have supported Mr. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. When President Biden defeated Mr. Trump in the 2020 election, a now-archived, December 2020 Twitter post from the Ingrassia siblings’ podcast’s now private Twitter handle called on Mr. Trump to “declare martial law and secure his re-election!” 

After graduating from Cornell in 2022, Mr. Ingrassia worked as a law clerk at Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, according to his LinkedIn page. In 2023, he joined the McBride Law Firm as a “law clerk”, although an archived press release listed him as “an associate attorney,” where he “helped facilitate Tucker Carlson’s face-to-face interview with Andrew and Tristan Tate.”

He represented the brothers,  social media provocateurs who were recently accused of 21 charges of rape and human trafficking in the United Kingdom, in a civil defamation suit they filed in Florida against their accusers. 

A Trump loyalist, Mr. Ingrassia has spent the early months of the second Trump Administration as the White House liaison to the Justice Department and then to Homeland Security.

“As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement,” Mr. Ingrassia posted on X. 

In 2023, in the hours immediately following the slaughter on October 7, he expressed isolationist views popular among some far-right conservatives when he argued that, “We shouldn’t be beating the war drum, however tragic the events may be overseas, until we resolve our domestic problems first.” 

He also supported free speech rights for some of the right’s most controversial voices, including the white supremacist Nick Fuentes after he was kicked out of a Turning Point USA meeting.   

“Conservatives should always uphold the First Amendment and allow for dissident voices, especially those that abide by the venue’s rules — which was the case here,” Mr. Ingrassia wrote about Mr. Fuentes’s ejection on X.

The left-of-center Project on Government Oversight, in a post on Bluesky, the liberal social media platform, criticized Mr. Ingrassia’s nomination, lumping him in with other Trump watchdog picks as “yeasayers whose willingness to stand up to the administration is questionable at best.”

“Appointing someone to a senior administration role despite their documented support for antisemites seriously conflicts with and undermines ongoing efforts to combat antisemitism at this critical moment,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement. The “support” the ADL cites is Mr. Ingrassia advocating on social media for Nick Fuentes’ free speech rights to be respected.

The special counsel typically serves a five-year term and is responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act, investigating prohibited personnel practices, and protecting whistleblowers and federal employees.