Judge Andrew Napolitano may be temporarily sidelined at Fox News, but he’s been telling friends and associates that he could be in for a big promotion — to the Supreme Court.

After meeting with President Trump twice during the transition, first in December and again in mid-January, the Newark, N.J.-born television personality told several people that Trump said he was on the list of judges from whom he was selecting a nominee for the high court.


“He said, ‘Trump said I’m on the list,’” said a source who spoke with Napolitano shortly after one of his meetings with the then president-elect. “He’s been saying that since the transition.”

Friends warned Napolitano not to take the president too literally – or seriously. “He'll take your call and invite you to the Oval Office, but he just wants you to say nice things about him on TV,” the source says he told Napolitano at the time. But that didn’t sink the ambitious judge’s hopes.

Trump released a list of potential replacements for the late Justice Antonin Scalia before the election, vowing to select Scalia’s replacement from that list — and followed through, tapping Tenth Circuit judge Neil Gorsuch for the nomination in January. Napolitano’s name did not appear on any public list.

But the salt-and-pepper-haired Napolitano, 66, who served as a New Jersey Superior Court judge until 1995 and joined Fox News in 1998, was a sleeper candidate, he told his skeptical friends. He claims he’s submitted both academic and personal resumes to Trump aides, and that they’ve pored over the judge’s writings, including several popular non-fiction books.

People familiar with the president’s thinking dismissed the idea that Napolitano is being considered for a Supreme Court nomination. “The president already has a list of highly qualified contenders for future SCOTUS openings, and Judge Napolitano is not on it,” said a person close to the White House.

Since the Gorsuch nomination, Napolitano has continued to maintain that he is in the running for a seat, telling a colleague that Trump promised him the next Supreme Court seat “if I get another one.”

Neither Napolitano nor Fox News responded to requests for comment. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders declined to comment, saying it was a personnel matter.

In his transition meetings with the president-elect at Trump Tower, the longtime Fox News personality said he discussed the Supreme Court vacancy. “He was interested in a broad range of ideas and attitudes about the type of person who would best fill Justice Scalia’s seat,”

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Napolitano told Fox Business’ Stuart Varney in an on-air readout of their conversation. At their second meeting, which he described as “awesome, to say the least,” Napolitano told Varney that he and the president-elect discussed “judicial attitudes, judicial temperament, ideology, and candidates for the court.”

Napolitano sparked controversy last week on Fox News’s morning show, Fox & Friends, when he alleged – citing three anonymous sources – that the top British spy agency had wiretapped Trump on behalf of President Barack Obama during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump turned the reporting into an international incident when he stood by the disputed wiretap claim at a joint White House press conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel, citing Napolitano’s reporting.

“That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox,” the president said when pressed for proof of his claim. “And so you shouldn’t be talking to me. You should be talking to Fox.”

Fox News disavowed the statement, suspending him from the air indefinitely even as the White House seized on the claim. Press secretary Sean Spicer used it to bolster Trump’s assertion that Obama wiretapped him during the campaign, and President Trump himself weighed in last Friday, calling Napolitano “a very talented legal mind.”

It’s not the first time Napolitano has stirred up controversy. He is a well-known conspiracy theorist, and a vocal proponent of the view that the U.S. government is hiding something about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “I think 20 years from now, people will look at 9/11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today,” he told radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in 2010. “It couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.”