Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller is making an 11th hour attempt to install a former White House official to a career position as the top lawyer for the National Security Agency, a move national security experts call a blatant attempt to policize a top position, the Washington Post reports.

Miller ordered the Director of the NSA Paul Nakasone to install Michael Ellis to the position of NSA’s General Counsel by 6 p.m. Saturday.  Nakasone did not make the appointment and is said to be against Ellis taking the position.

Ellis was nominated for the position by Pentagon General Counsel Paul C. Ney Jr. in November.  He has not taken the position yet because he’s failed to take a required polygraph and fulfilled other administrative requirements.

Ellis, who was once Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, was reported by the New York Times to have given White House security documents to then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Republican Devin Nunes.  Prior to joining the White House, he had been Nunes’s legal counsel.

“An 11th-hour move like this and a directive from the acting secretary of defense is overwhelmingly strong evidence of irregularity,” Susan Hennessey, a former lawyer in the NSA Office of General Counsel, wrote on Lawfare Saturday. “Unless the acting secretary of defense can produce a compelling rationale for why this individual needed to be installed now, there should be a presumption that this is improper and the Biden team should remove this individual on Day 1.”

Insiders say that Ellis was deemed to not be the best candidate for the job, with other interviewees scoring high than he did.  However, the White House has made a push to put Ellis in this career position to give him a permanent government position with just four days left in the Trump Administration.