Doug Jones seen as leading contender as Biden attorney general: report

by Zack Budryk - 12/08/20 4:21 PM ET

Outgoing Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) has emerged as the No. 1 contender for President-elect Joe Biden’s attorney general, according to NBC News, citing three sources familiar with the discussions.

Other contenders reportedly include former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and Judge Merrick Garland, whom former President Obama nominated to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court in 2016. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to hold hearings on Garland’s nomination.

Jones, first elected in 2017, was defeated in his 2020 bid for a full term by Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville, former head football coach at Auburn University. His nomination would come almost exactly four years after President Trump named then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, also from Alabama, to the position.

Jones told NBC News he believed “it’s better not to make any comments” on whether he would accept the nomination if offered.

“They’ve got a process that they go through, and hopefully they’ll wrap some of that up pretty soon,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has yet to acknowledge Biden as the winner of the election, also declined to comment on the possibility. Graham told NBC “we’ll talk about that after Dec. 14,” when the electoral college is scheduled to meet.

Jones was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama by then-President Clinton in 1997. During his tenure, he successfully prosecuted two former members of the Ku Klux Klan for the 1963 bombing that killed four Black girls in Birmingham’s 16^th Street Baptist Church.

Biden and Jones also have a long relationship. The two worked together when Biden sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Jones was a prosecutor. Jones worked on Biden’s two previous presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008. Biden would later campaign for Jones in the 2017 special election, one of few national Democratic figures to visit the historically conservative state during the cycle.