Appointee who led Trump’s tech crackdown tapped for top DOJ role

Adam Candeub, the acting head of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, has been named deputy associate attorney general. The political appointment does not require congressional confirmation. Candeub helped lead President Donald Trump’s crackdown against social media companies. Candeub has played a central role in carrying out Trump’s executive order targeting social media companies like Twitter and Facebook over allegations they censor conservative viewpoints. The executive order asked federal agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, to narrow the scope of a crucial set of liability protections that shield online companies from lawsuits over the user content they host. One of Candeub’s advisers at the NTIA, Nathan Simington, was confirmed to a five-year term as an FCC commissioner. Candeub, who first joined NTIA earlier in 2020, has a long history of bashing the social media giants over allegations of an anti-conservative bias. In 2018, Candeub represented a white nationalist in a lawsuit against Twitter alleging the social network censored him.