Donald Trump has chosen the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway to head the civil division of the Justice Department, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

George Conway was chosen to lead the office that has responsibility for defending the administration’s proposed travel ban and defending lawsuits filed against the administration, the newspaper said.

The White House and the justice department would not confirm the pick on Saturday. George Conway declined to comment.

Conway is a partner at the New York law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The law firm’s website says Conway has extensive experience in litigation involving securities, mergers and acquisitions, contracts and antitrust cases.

He graduated from Harvard and then Yale Law School. He joined the law firm in 1988, soon after his graduation from law school.

He has been involved in numerous complex, high-profile cases with that firm, where he has been a partner since 1994. In the 1990s, Conway wrote the supreme court brief that cleared the way for Paula Jones’ civil suit against President Bill Clinton.

Clinton’s denial of an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky during a deposition in the Jones case led to his impeachment trial.

Kellyanne Conway is a long-time Republican pollster who joined Trump’s presidential campaign at a critical moment of upheaval last summer, after its campaign chairman abruptly resigned. She was named campaign manager and quickly earned the candidate’s trust, later being named a senior adviser in the White House.



She is also close with daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, another senior adviser and influential voice in Trump’s inner circle.

Conway has been at the center of a number of controversies since taking up her White House post, including a defense of inaccurate “alternative facts” about inauguration crowds, the citation of a non-existent terrorist atrocity, and the apparent promotion of Ivanka Trump’s products in a TV interview, an act that violated ethics rules and resulted in Conway being “counseled”.