President-elect Donald Trump has decided to keep former Google executive Michelle Lee on as director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, who informed tech industry organizations gathered in Washington Thursday for a breakfast event.

Issa's comments were confirmed by two sources in attendance and a congressional aide.

The possibility of Lee's reappointment has been swirling in the patent world in recent days, but the official decision seems to have been a recent one: Lee had already been preparing to send a farewell letter to USPTO staff, according to another source familiar with the situation. Lee had also formally filed a resignation letter in December, in line with a directive from President Barack Obama.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment. Paul Fucito, spokesman for the patent office, declined to comment.

Issa, the chairman of the House's subcommittee on patents and a vocal Trump ally, has backed Lee publicly. At the Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegas in early January, Issa said "we just have to get Michelle to stay on long enough to finish what she started," telling the crowd, "if you haven't written to a gilded building in New York" — that is, Trump Tower — "please do."

Thursday he called Lee "one of the great things to come out of the Obama era," according to a person who was at the event.

Obama nominated Lee to head the USPTO in 2014, and she is the first woman to be made a permanent director of the agency in its centuries-long history.

The choice of who will head the Patent and Trademark Office has traditionally been given to the the head of the Department of Commerce, in which USPTO sits. Wilbur Ross, Trump's pick to be Commerce secretary, positively highlighted Lee in his confirmation hearing Wednesday.

"I had a discussion yesterday morning with the current head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and actually asked about how she was dealing with the matters with her former relationship with Google," Ross said. "She outlined a thorough process for recusal and determining recusal and I intend to emulate the standard she set."

Those remarks, along with Lee's earlier statement in an interview with POLITICO that she would be "open" to continuing to serve under Trump raised expectations in the patent community that she might stay on in the post.

Also leading to assumptions that Lee might indeed stay on is that she and Trump technology adviser Peter Thiel are both members of the 1992 graduating class of Stanford Law School.

Lee's reappointment is not without controversy. Her original selection by Obama in 2014 was seen as a win for the technology industry in its long-running tensions with the bio-pharmaceutical industry over the focus of U.S. patent policy.

"Overall we're very happy to hear that she's going to be staying on," said Matt Levy, patent counsel at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, an organization of which tech groups like Facebook, Google and Amazon are members. "We think she's done a solid job at improving quality and transparency at the office and making the process of obtaining a patent one that is fairer and better for the economy."

He said the certainty the patent community gets by continuing current management is a "positive thing."

Some patent experts have expected Trump to take a more aggressive approach to patents than Silicon Valley often takes, given his railing on the campaign trail against China's "rampant theft of intellectual property."

Lee, who served a dozen years as patent counsel at Google, has been seen in her years in office as walking a careful line between the two patent camps — choosing to focus less on policy than on process upgrades aimed at improving the quality of patents issued by the office.

"I hope that Director Lee expands her focus from just patent quality and lends her expertise and authority to help fix the very real problem that the U.S. has lost its "gold standard" patent system — it no longer promises stable, effective property rights to innovators," said Adam Mosoff, a law professor and co-founder of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property at George Mason University.

Lee's alma mater Google has largely escaped the criticisms that Trump has otherwise heaped on the tech industry. Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently lunched with Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.