After using his almost nightly platform on Fox News’ Hannity to push legal defenses of President Donald Trump’s various scandals and effectively audition for a job at the White House, Jay Sekulow, who was recently hired as one of Trump’s personal attorneys, has found himself at the center of rumors that Trump is considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller.

During the June 11 episode of ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Sekulow if Trump would “promise not to interfere, not attempt at anytime to order the deputy attorney general to fire Robert Mueller.” Sekulow did not give a definitive response, instead saying, “If there was a basis … that raised the kind of issues that are serious, as in the situation with James Comey, the president has authority to take action. Whether he will do it is ultimately a decision the president makes.” Later, Newsmax Media CEO Chris Ruddy, who is a close friend of the president, said that Trump was “considering perhaps terminating the special counsel.” Ruddy also cited Sekulow’s response and said that the fact that Trump is “weighing” this “option” was made “pretty clear by what one of his lawyers said on television recently.”

As explained by the Los Angeles Times, “The public comments from close friends suggest Trump may be testing the waters on a decision that would be among the most controversial he has made since becoming president, recalling the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ when President Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox amid the Watergate investigation.”

Since Trump’s inauguration in January, Sekulow has appeared on Fox News numerous times to defend the president’s actions and to parrot administration talking points. Highlights of his appearances include his assertion that Trump acted “within his authority” to fire then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates because, as Sekulow argued, “unlike the FBI director,” the acting attorney general and other federal appointees “serve at the pleasure of the president.” Sekulow later claimed that he had been calling for Comey’s removal “for a year,” contradicting his earlier comment that the president cannot remove the FBI director.

In addition, after Comey’s June 8 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sekulow repeated an erroneous timeline around Comey’s firing that came from one of Trump’s other personal lawyers, Marc Kasowitz. He said Comey lied under oath and committed a “crime” when he leaked the memos about his meetings with Trump, which Comey said he had released after the president made thinly veiled threats on Twitter against him. Sekulow falsely said that the “content” of the memo had actually been reported in The New York Times the day before Trump’s tweets, claiming that the release was “retaliatory” for Comey’s firing. In reality, the Times had cited officials, and not the memos, for its story on the dinner between Trump and Comey in which the president allegedly asked him for loyalty. The story about the memos was published four days after Trump’s tweets. 

Although Sekulow appears to not have much experience outside of Fox News punditry when it comes to criminal defense and obstruction of justice, he is a well-known conservative activist and attorney who has both personally and through his organization -- the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) -- promoted hard-right religious ideologies both in this country and abroad.