President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Credit: White House

A former top in-house lawyer at Chevron Corp. who earlier lobbied for DLA Piper has joined the White House counsel's office.

Kevin O'Scannlain will serve as special assistant to the president and associate counsel to the president. According to his LinkedIn page, O'Scannlain joined the administration in December, although his hiring was not formally announced until Feb. 9.

O'Scannlain had worked for six years as a senior counsel at Chevron, where he oversaw compliance with campaign finance, lobbying and ethics laws.

Before Chevron, O'Scannlain lobbied at DLA Piper for a client roster that included Amazon.com Inc., Discover Financial Services Inc., Experian, Rite Aid Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. In late 2011, he lobbied for Qualcomm on wireless communication policies and “cybersecurity issues.” That same year, he lobbied on the Dodd-Frank financial reforms for Discover. His lobbying for Amazon, in 2007, focused on patent reform.

In 2010, six years before a data breach rocked Equifax Inc., he lobbied for the credit reporting bureau Experian on “privacy, credit freeze and data security,” according to a disclosure form.

O'Scannlain previously served as senior counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee under the panel's former chairman, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch.

He is a son of Ninth Circuit Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain and a brother of Kate O'Scannlain, the former Kirkland & Ellis partner who's now serving as the U.S. Labor Department solicitor.

O'Scannlain has entered the White House at a time of close scrutiny around the counsel's office.

Last month, The New York Times reported that White House counsel Donald McGahn, a former Jones Day partner, threatened to quit in June to stop President Donald Trump from firing special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. The New York Times has also reported that McGahn, on Trump's orders, unsuccessfully tried to stop U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Russia probe.

McGahn, a former member of the Federal Election Commission who previously worked as the Trump campaign's top attorney, has been interviewed by Mueller's team. McGahn has been represented in that probe by William Burck, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, who is also representing former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Several lawyers have left the White House counsel's office since the start of the Trump administration. Those departures include James Schultz, who returned to Cozen O'Connor and Gregory Katsas, who was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

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