This Trump Judicial Nominee Has a Pretty Alarming Twitter History

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump nominated Kara Westercamp, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office, for a life-tenured judgeship on the U.S. Court of International Trade. On Truth Social, Trump called Westercamp a “very experienced Trade Lawyer” who “knows the Wisdom and Courage to protect the American People,” and “will always put America First.” 

Westercamp would indeed appear to bring some practical experience to the job: Prior to joining the White House Counsel’s office, she spent a decade at the Commercial Litigation Branch of the Department of Justice, where she regularly tried cases before the Court of International Trade, according to her LinkedIn profile. The fact that Trump now hopes to place Westercamp, currently serving as one of his in-house attorneys, on a body that is deeply involved in adjudicating the legal challenges to his tariffs agenda is, I am sure, a coincidence.

For my money, the bullet points on Westercamp’s résumé are less interesting than her Twitter/X account, which is now protected. To be fair, “protect my old tweets” is also what I would do if I were chasing a job that required me to swear an oath to faithfully and impartially enforce the law, and archived versions of my timeline suggested that I am the sort of aggressively online Trump loyalist who takes breathless #tcot selfies with Fox News talking heads, and enjoys Jim Halpert memes about how Critical Race Theory is racist.  

Also scattered across Westercamp’s Twitter timeline between October 2016 and February 2023 are tweets and retweets that (among many other things) question the results of the 2020 election, parrot transphobic talking points, sympathize with January 6 insurrectionists, and generally express unbridled enthusiasm for Trump and his political movement.

This one is a little wonky because of how the Wayback Machine displays tweets, but Westercamp posed this question about the 2020 election results in Georgia in response to the tweet I’ve reproduced directly beneath it.

As it so happens, the Wayback Machine took a snapshot of Westercamp’s Twitter timeline on January 8, 2021, but the archived version loads only the generic Twitter/X “Something went wrong” broken-link graphic. Thus, whatever Westercamp was tweeting roughly 48 hours after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, I cannot find a record of it.

Since Trump began his second term in the White House, personal fealty to him has been the most important qualification for ambitious conservative lawyers who aspire to seats on the federal bench. Rarely, however, has a Trump nominee auditioned for a job quite so explicitly, in such a public manner, over so many years, with so many hashtags.

Westercamp is likely to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearing on March 25. In a statement sent to me by email, White House Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “Individuals nominated to the federal bench are not precluded from judicial office simply because they previously exercised their First Amendment rights. President Trump selects judicial nominees who will uphold our Constitution and the rule of law. When confirmed, Kara will do just that.”