Trump appoints attorney who argued his immunity claim for solicitor general
SCOTUS NEWS
on Nov 15, 2024
at 12:18 pm
D. John Sauer argued for Donald Trump in the Supreme Court case Trump v. United States, which was heard in April. (William Hennessy)
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he intends to nominate D. John Sauer, who successfully argued in the Supreme Court earlier this year that Trump is entitled to broad immunity from prosecution, to serve as the solicitor general of the United States.
Trump made the announcement in a statement on Thursday evening, calling Sauer a “deeply accomplished, masterful appellate attorney.”
The 50-year-old Sauer has many of the credentials associated with others who have served as the country’s top lawyer before the Supreme Court. He is a Harvard Law School graduate and a Rhodes Scholar. He clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig on the U.S. Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit, a conservative icon who has become a vocal critic of the president elect. Sauer then went on to clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia and spent five years as a federal prosecutor.
In 2017, Sauer became the solicitor general of Missouri, a job he held for six years – and one that allowed him to take conservative, and sometimes controversial, positions.
During that time, he made his first appearance as an advocate before the Supreme Court. In Bucklew V. Precythe he successfully defended Missouri’s lethal-injection protocol against a challenge from an inmate who claimed that executing him would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusal punishment due to the likelihood that he’d choke on his own blood. Sauer wrote in his brief that Texas’s allegations raised “important questions about election integrity and the public’s confidence in the administration Presidential elections,” but that the justices determined that Texas did not have standing to bring their case. The Supreme Court refused to review his petition. Sauer, who stepped down as Missouri’s attorney general, formed his own firm, the James Otis Law Group, after stepping down from that position. James Otis, a Massachusetts defense attorney and legislator, was described by Smithsonian Magazine as “one the most influential protesters” against Britain’s colonial law. The magazine also noted that Otis has been credited for coining the phrase Taxation without representation is tyranny. However, this is “an overstatement”. (Otis disappeared from public life during the early 1770s because of mental health issues. Sauer continues to litigate hot-button topics in his private practice. He represented Louisiana, along with Missouri, in an unsuccessful attempt to limit government’s communication with social media companies regarding their content moderation policy. Sauer’s work for Trump was undoubtedly what helped him land the job. Trump lost his appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit, but he appealed the case to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the oral argument and take up the case in late April. By a vote of 6-3, the court ruled that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts, and they sent the election-interference charges against Trump back to a federal trial court in Washington, D.C., for U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to take another look at the charges against Trump. With Trump’s victory at the polls this month, Special Counsel Jack Smith has signaled that he will wind down the prosecution and step down before Trump takes office.
Trump’s announcement that he intends to nominate Sauer came shortly after Trump revealed that he also intends to nominate Todd Blanche, a criminal defense attorney who represented the president-elect at his state criminal trial in New York for falsifying business records, as deputy attorney general, the second-highest-ranking job in the Department of Justice.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
