Trump nominates Aditya Bamzai to agency on privacy, civil liberties

A University of Virginia law professor has been named to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board by President Donald Trump.

The White House announced the nomination of Aditya Bamzai in an Aug. 8 press release, saying that Bamzai and Travis LeBlanc, former chief of the enforcement bureau of the Federal Communications Commission, would be joining the independent executive branch agency.

The five-member bipartisan agency was created in 2007 to ensure that the government’s national security efforts are “balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties,” according to its website. Bamzai was nominated for a term that expires on Jan. 29, 2020, according to the White House website.

The board has only one member, attorney Elisebeth Collins.

The board has been responsible for evaluating government operations under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Trump’s earlier nominees, Edward Felten and Jane Nitze, await Senate confirmation along with the 2017 nomination of Adam Klein as board chair, according to the White House press release.

Bamzai will remain a member of the University of Virginia’s School of Law faculty. If he is confirmed, his service would be part-time, the university said in a press release.

According to Bamzai’s profile on the university website, he “teaches and writes about civil procedure, administrative law, federal courts, national security law and computer crime. He joined the University of Virginia School of Law’s faculty as an associate professor in June 2016. His work has been published in prominent law journals and he has argued cases relating to the separation of powers and national security in the U.S. Supreme Court, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, D.C. Circuit and other federal courts of appeals.”

The university website also writes: “Before entering the academy, Bamzai served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as an appellate attorney in both private practice and for the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. Earlier in his career, he was a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He is a graduate of Yale University and of the University of Chicago Law School, where he was the editor-in-chief of the law review.

Independent Bipartisan Agency Reviews Counterterrorism Legislation, Regulations and Policies.”