“The Most Important Unknown Person in D.C.”; Slate, June 26, 2017

Leon Neyfakh, Slate; “The Most Important Unknown Person in D.C.”

"Yates and Rosenstein have more in common than the sudden and unexpected fame they’ve both attained amid the turbulence of the Trump era. The DOJ officials have also shared an adviser, a former prosecutor from South Carolina named Scott Newton Schools. As the senior-most career attorney at the Justice Department, Schools is responsible for helping the deputy attorney general—the person who runs the DOJ on a day-to-day basis—in navigating the agency’s hardest, most sensitive problems and spotting potholes on the road ahead.

Schools is “the most important unknown person in D.C.,” said Gregory Harris, a defense lawyer who served alongside him in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Carolina. And while Schools’ job is one that “almost nobody outside of DOJ knows about or understands,” in the words of Obama-era DOJ official Kathryn Ruemmler, it has never been more crucial to maintaining the department’s stability."