Donald Trump has chosen Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama for the job of US attorney general and Congressman Mike Pompeo as CIA chief, his campaign announced on Friday.

He also confirmed he would nominate Lt Gen Michael Flynn as assistant to the president for national security affairs.

Sessions is a longtime rightwing and anti-immigrant member of the Senate. Pompeo is a vocal critic of the Iran nuclear deal, and a supporter of NSA bulk data collection. Flynn is a former military intelligence chief who has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration.

Trump was due to hold a two-hour transition meeting including Vice-President-elect Mike Pence on Friday, a campaign official said. He would then meet Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, at 2pm.

On Saturday in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump is due to meet Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012. Romney has been a fierce critic of Trump but is now rumoured to be in contention for the prize position of secretary of state.

Trump spokesman Sean Spicer told a conference call: “The president-elect wants the best and brightest and people who can suggest how to move this country forward.”

Trump intends to meet Republicans, Democrats and independents, he added, and yesterday’s talks with Henry Kissinger were an example of his inclusive approach. “The conversation with Mitt Romney is an opportunity to hear his ideas and thoughts.”

In a statement announcing the nominations on Friday, Trump called Sessions “a world-class legal mind” and “a truly great attorney general and US attorney in the state of Alabama”. Sessions said he was humbled to have been asked to serve by the president-elect, adding: “I enthusiastically embrace President-elect Trump’s vision for ‘one America’, and his commitment to equal justice under law.”

The president-elect said he was pleased that Flynn – a key ally from the military world throughout his presidential campaign – would be “by my side as we work to defeat radical Islamic terrorism, navigate geopolitical challenges and keep Americans safe at home and abroad”. Flynn said: “I am deeply humbled and honoured to accept the position as national security adviser to serve both our country and our nation’s next president, Donald J Trump.”

Trump said Pompeo would be “a brilliant and unrelenting leader for our intelligence community to ensure the safety of Americans and our allies”. The congressman said he “looked forward to working with America’s intelligence warriors, who do so much to protect Americans each and every day”.

Sessions

Sessions has served in the Senate since 1997, and served as Alabama’s attorney general for two years before that. The lawmaker has the rare distinction of once being passed over for a federal judgeship, because of racist comments he allegedly made.

During Sessions’ confirmation hearing in 1986, lawmakers heard testimony that Sessions called respected civil rights organizations “communist inspired”. In another set of testimony, a prosecutor told Congress that Sessions had said he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot”. Sessions said the comment was a joke, but his judgeship was rejected.

Since working in the Senate, Sessions has proved one of the most anti-immigration members of the legislature.

Last year, he wrote a 25-page report blaming job losses and welfare dependency on immigration. The Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority argued for limiting work visas and “establishing firm control over entry and exit in the United States”.

“For decades, the American people have begged and pleaded for a just and lawful system of immigration that serves their interests,” wrote Sessions. “But their demands are refused. For years, Americans have been scorned and mocked by the elite denizens of Washington and Wall Street for having legitimate concerns about how uncontrolled immigration impacts their jobs, wages, schools, hospitals, police departments, and communities.”

Neema Singh Giuliani of the ACLU said: “When it comes to privacy and mass surveillance, Sessions has repeatedly been on the wrong side of the Constitution, public opinion, and laws passed by a Republican-controlled Congress.”



Pompeo

Pompeo, elected to Congress as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave, has enjoyed a quick rise on Capitol Hill, thanks in part to his penchant for incendiary statements about national security.

After the Boston Marathon in 2013 bombings, Pompeo falsely claimed that US Muslim organizations and religious leaders had not condemned terrorism. “Silence has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts,” he said on the House floor.

Yet Pompeo took a place on the House intelligence committee and sits on its CIA and NSA subcommittees, where he has positioned himself as a vigorous advocate of the most hardline priorities of both agencies.

Mike Pompeo. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

After the 2014 release of a landmark Senate report into CIA torture, Pompeo personally attacked the report’s leader, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein “has put American lives at risk”, Pompeo said, calling those at the CIA who participated in torture “heroes, not pawns in some liberal game being played by the ACLU and Senator Feinstein”. His potential elevation to CIA director increases the chances that the agency and Senator Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, will prevail in destroying the remaining classified copies of the report, currently caught in a legal limbo.

A relentless critic of the Iran nuclear deal, Pompeo has veered into wilder charges against Obama. After the treasury department permitted Airbus and Boeing to sell passenger aircraft to the Iranian commercial airline in September, Pompeo said: “President Obama today announced he is essentially helping build the Iranian air force.”

Like many in the GOP, including Donald Trump, Pompeo has been a fervent opponent of closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. Although Guantánamo interrogations stopped years ago, since the most recent detainees arrived in 2008, Pompeo in 2014 said Obama’s planned closure was “diminishing our ability to extract intelligence from jihadists engaged in terrorism”. Shuttering the facility was counterproductive as “the threat of radical Islamic terror has increased so drastically”.

Pompeo has waxed enthusiastic about rolling back the minimal restrictions on the US surveillance apparatus enacted during the Obama administration. Yet his description of those restrictions has not always been accurate. In a January op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Pompeo incorrectly claimed the “collection of phone metadata under the Patriot Act was banned by Congress and finally ceased at the end of November”. In fact, the USA Freedom Act of 2015 only restricted the bulk collection of domestic US phone metadata, without touching the vast powers the Patriot Act provides to the FBI for surreptitious collection of communications and financial data.

Pompeo favored expanding US surveillance powers substantially, to include “re-establishing collection of all metadata” and proposing a “comprehensive, searchable database” that includes “publicly available financial and lifestyle information”, without defining what “lifestyle information” means. “Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed,” he continued, adding: “The use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag.”