A lawyer who helped the Trump campaign organize an event last fall with several women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct says she has accepted a top civil-rights position at the Department of Education, according to reports by Politico Pro and The Washington Post.
The lawyer, Candice E. Jackson, wrote on her personal website that she had accepted “an appointment” in the Education Department and would no longer be practicing law. The Pepperdine School of Law reported more specifically that Ms. Jackson had accepted an appointment to serve “as the deputy assistant secretary for civil rights and acting assistant secretary for civil rights.”
Neither the White House nor the Education Department would confirm the appointment to the news organizations on Sunday. Ms. Jackson declined to comment, saying she had not yet started her new role.
The Post noted that if the Pepperdine report is accurate, Ms. Jackson would temporarily be in charge of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which has taken a leading role in the Obama administration’s efforts to step up federal oversight of how colleges deal with sexual assault. Some victims’ advocates have worried that the Trump administration will scale back those efforts.
Ms. Jackson is the author of the 2005 book Their Lives: Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine. She helped Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last fall by organizing a news conference at which Mr. Trump appeared with several women who accused Bill Clinton of unwanted sexual advances, and one woman who criticized Hillary Clinton’s conduct more than 40 years ago as the court-appointed attorney for a man accused of raping the woman when she was a 12-year-old girl.
