Dhillon would be part of the legal team to serve under White House Counsel Donald F McGahn.
President Donald Trump has appointed Indian American attorney Uttam Dhillon as his special assistant and associate councel.
Dhillon, an expert in ethics and law, would be part of the legal team to serve under White House Counsel Donald F McGahn with respect to compliance and ethics matters.
The appointment made Dhillon the second Indian American on President Trump’s White House staff, and he will have an important role in ensuring that problems do not arise from the businessman-turned-President’s extensive businesses.
Trump’s extensive empire of over 400 companies that span the globe has raised ethical issues because of the intersection of business and government. It is the job of the compliance team to ensure that ethics problems do not crop up, or are doused as soon as they come up.
Dhillon, who graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987, was the chief oversight counsel for the House of Representative Committee on Financial Services. He was responsible for Congressional investigations of the financial services industry and government regulators.
He has also worked as an associate deputy general in President George W. Bush’s administration and as the director of counter-narcotics enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security.
Other members of the team are Stefan C Passantino, who has been commissioned to serve as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President, along with Scott Gast and James D Schultz, who have been commissioned to serve as Special Assistants to the President and Associate Counsel to the President.
The White House spokesperson Sean Spicer on Wednesday described the team members as “esteemed” lawyers of “high caliber.”
Earlier, Trump appointed strategic communications and political research expert Raj Shah as his deputy assistant and research director on the White House staff.
The President also appointed three other India American persons to senior administration positions – Nikki Haley as the ambassador to the UN, Ajit Pai as the head the Federal Communications Commission that regulates all wireless and electronic communications, and Seema Verma as the head of the government health insurance programs.