If Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is fired or resigns, he would be replaced by Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who would assume oversight of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

Francisco, who was confirmed to the post in September 2017 by a 50-47 vote in the Senate, was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and served in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration, Vox reported.

He also worked on Bush’s legal team during the 2000 election-year recount in Florida and was a partner in the law firm that represented former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in his corruption case before the Supreme Court.

The court ruled in McDonnell’s favor.

If the 49-year-old Francisco takes over the Mueller investigation, he could allow it to continue, narrow its scope or end it.

In past testimony, he has argued against the need for special counsels and in favor of allowing the president broad executive powers.

Testifying in 2007 before a congressional panel investigating Bush’s firing of nine US attorneys, Francisco, then a private lawyer, defended the administration’s actions, Mother Jones reported.

“I don’t think it would be appropriate for the Department of Justice to appoint” a special counsel, he said, according to the report.

“My own personal belief is that when you hand these issues off to the career prosecutors in the public integrity sections in the US attorneys’ offices in the Department of Justice, those attorneys are generally better able to assess whether a case should be pursued,” Francisco said.

He also said he believed that conversations between administration officials should be protected by executive privilege even if Bush wasn’t involved in the discussions, concluding it would ultimately be up to the court to decide.

Francisco represented the US as solicitor general in a case before the Supreme Court in April that delved into whether the president has constitutional power to fire “all officers of the United States,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“The Constitution gives the president what the framers saw as the traditional means of ensuring accountability: the power to oversee executive officers through removal,” he wrote in the case, the newspaper reported. “The president is accordingly authorized under our constitutional system to remove all principal officers, as well as all ‘inferior officers’ he has appointed.”