In firing Sessions — by tweet, natch — Trump announced that Matt Whitaker, Sessions‘ chief of staff at Justice, would become the acting Attorney General, a post he can hold for roughly 200 days because he has not been confirmed previously by the Senate.

But even having Whitaker in the job for the next 100 days could be enough for Trump. Whitaker has been openly critical of the breadth of Mueller‘s investigation and even mused on this chain of events in a 2017 interview with CNN: