Daniel Jorjani, a political appointee at the Interior Department who once told colleagues that “our job is to protect the Secretary” from ethics probes and bad press, will appear before a Senate committee Thursday to make his case for a promotion to be the agency’s top lawyer.

Jorjani is a former adviser for fossil fuel moguls Charles and David Koch and has served as Interior’s principal deputy solicitor since May 2017. The job includes managing the agency’s ethics office and, more recently, overseeing all public information requests sent to the agency. President Donald Trump officially tapped Jorjani for the solicitor post last month, which has been vacant since the Trump administration took office.

The nominee’s appearance before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee comes shortly after Interior’s internal watchdog announced a pair of ethics investigations into multiple high-ranking agency officials. One of those probes targets newly confirmed secretary David Bernhardt, while the other is looking into allegations against six officials who maintained close ties to their former employers.

Jorjani will appear Thursday alongside Mark Lee Greenblatt, Trump’s nominee to serve as Interior Inspector General. Mary Kendall, the deputy inspector general who oversaw investigations into former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s conduct, is set to retire this month. If confirmed, Greenblatt, now the assistant inspector general for investigations at the Department of Commerce, would take over several ongoing probes.

The new Inspector General investigations will likely serve as new fodder for committee Democrats who have voiced concerns about ethical lapses by agency officials and voted against Bernhardt’s nomination last month, citing his long list of potential conflicts of interests stemming from his years as an oil and gas lobbyist. Thursday’s hearing will give lawmakers a rare opportunity to question the person who has overseen the agency’s ethics office since early in Zinke’s tenure, and would continue to do so if confirmed as solicitor. Zinke resigned in January under a cloud of ethics scandals.

As principal deputy solicitor, Jorjani proved himself a loyal gatekeeper of the former secretary. As HuffPost reported last May, he took six months to respond to investigators probing Zinke’s apparent effort to bully Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) into supporting Obamacare repeal last year, only to dodge their questions entirely. And in a March 2017 email to colleagues, Jorjani boasted that he had “successfully protected” Interior presidential appointments facing investigations and that their primary responsibility was to do the same for Zinke.

“At the end of the day our job is to protect the Secretary,” he wrote.