In early January 2014 it was reported that President Obama was likely to appoint Adegbile—who at the time was senior counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee—to replace Thomas Perez as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Noting that Adegbile had voluntarily chosen to help the already-convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal in his efforts to escape execution, Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) and Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams wrote: “It is one thing to provide legal representation and quite another to seize on a case and turn it into a political platform from which to launch an extreme attack on the justice system. When a lawyer chooses that course, it is appropriate to ask whether he should be singled out for a high-level national position in, of all things, law enforcement.”