Quote:*Scott Schools, the Department of Justice's top career attorney and an influential adviser to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, is stepping down this week.

*One DOJ veteran said Schools likely had "considerable influence" over critical decisions Rosenstein made, like appointing the special counsel Robert Mueller, weighing whether or not to recuse himself from the Russia probe, and green lighting an FBI raid on the properties of Michael Cohen.

*Schools is one of the few top DOJ officials who is regularly briefed on the Russia investigation.

Scott Schools, the Department of Justice's senior-most career attorney and a top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, will step down to take a job in the private sector, the department announced this week.

As associate deputy attorney general, Schools is Rosenstein's main adviser. Before Rosenstein, Schools was an aide to former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

Schools is also one of the few top DOJ officials who is regularly briefed on the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Schools' departure comes after Rachel Brand, formerly the third-in-command at the department, stepped down earlier this year. It also comes as President Donald Trump accuses Rosenstein and other top DOJ officials of corruption, and the Russia probe of being a politically motivated "witch hunt" against him and his associates.

Rosenstein has lately been on the receiving end of heightened criticism from GOP lawmakers.

Schools is "the most important unknown person in DC," Gregory Harris, a defense lawyer who worked alongside Schools at the US Attorney's Office in South Carolina, told Slate last year. Kathryn Ruemmler, an attorney who served in the White House counsel's office under President Barack Obama, said that while Schools' job is one that "almost nobody outside of DOJ knows about or understands," it is crucial in maintaining the DOJ's stability and structure.

Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who has worked with members of Mueller's team, said the associate deputy attorney general typically has "considerable influence" over such decisions, but that it ultimately depends on the relationship between the people in those roles.

Schools' name popped up in headlines earlier this year when it surfaced that he was one of the senior DOJ officials who recommended that then-FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe be fired hours before he was set to retire. McCabe was ousted after an internal investigation found that he "lacked candor" when speaking to FBI agents about his oversight of the Clinton investigation.

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His replacement will not be briefed on or oversee the Russia Probe.

Sounds like they were zeroing in on who exactly was making those inappropriate redactions in the documents.