President-elect Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he would nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to serve as attorney general, one of the most powerful positions in the Cabinet of an incoming president who promised to use federal law enforcement to harass and prosecute his political opponents.

Gaetz said on X immediately after the announcement that he would accept.

Trump’s pick of Gaetz as the country’s top law enforcement official contains nested layers of lawlessness. After spending the past year under four indictments, Trump has chosen to nominate a man who currently faces a House Ethics Committee probe for alleged sexual misconduct and drug use, among other things. That followed a very high-profile DOJ investigation into sex trafficking; federal prosecutors told Gaetz in February 2023 that he would not be charged.

The Gaetz pick marks Trump’s commitment to using law enforcement to crack down on his political opponents, and to soothe his own grievances. In the statement announcing his intent to appoint Gaetz, Trump lauded him for his role in fighting Trump’s enemies, and promised that the Florida congressman would continue to do so at DOJ: Gaetz, Trump said, will “end Weaponized Government” and “root out the systemic corruption at DOJ.”

Trump announced Gaetz’s nomination minutes after saying that he would nominate former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to lead the intelligence community as Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard secretly traveled to Syria in 2017 to meet with Bashar al-Assad, and maintained for years after that the well-documented mass murderer was being falsely accused. She’s trafficked in pro-Russia conspiracy theories, and the former Democrat is now a leading member of the MAGA Republican Party.

It all looks — and is intended to look — like an absurdist attack on the institutions that the nominees are being asked to lead. The two picks move the ball firmly into the court of Senate Republicans, who selected Sen. John Thune (R-SD) as majority leader on Wednesday morning.

Thune will start off with a choice: allow votes on the two nominees, among others, that may fail in the Senate, or go along with a demand that Trump issued before Thune’s election as majority leader for recess appointments. That would allow Trump to appoint these officials for two-year terms absent the typical Senate confirmation process.

After Trump demanded that the Senate allow extensive recess appointments, Thune stopped short of fully committing to the idea, saying in a statement over the weekend that “all options are on the table,” including recess appointments.

Multiple GOP Senators expressed varying levels of consternation at the appointments, though most avoided the central issue at hand: Trump’s demand that the Senate abdicate its constitutional authority and allow the appointments to go forward. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told one reporter that the Gaetz nomination shows “why the Senate’s advice and consent process is so important.”

Emine Yücel contributed reporting to this story.