Trump taps lawyer who argued his immunity case for solicitor general

President-elect Donald Trump introduced on Thursday that he intends to appoint D. John Sauer, who efficiently argued within the Supreme Courtroom earlier this yr that Trump is entitled to broad immunity from prosecution, to function the solicitor common of the USA.

Trump made the announcement in a press release on Thursday night, calling Sauer a “deeply achieved, masterful appellate lawyer.”

The 50-year-old Sauer has most of the credentials related to others who’ve served because the nation’s high lawyer earlier than the Supreme Courtroom. A Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Harvard Legislation College, he clerked on the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the 4th Circuit for Choose J. Michael Luttig, a conservative star who has since turn out to be an outspoken critic of the president-elect. Sauer then went on to clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia and spent 5 years as a federal prosecutor.

In 2017, Sauer turned the solicitor common of Missouri, a job he held for six years – and one which allowed him to take conservative, and generally controversial, positions.

Throughout that point, he made his first look as an advocate earlier than the Supreme Courtroom. In Bucklew v. Precythe, he efficiently defended the state’s deadly injection protocol towards a problem by an inmate who argued that executing him would violate the Eighth Modification’s ban on merciless and strange punishment due to the probability that he would find yourself choking on his personal blood.

In December 2020, Sauer led a bunch of states in submitting a “buddy of the court docket” temporary supporting Texas’s unsuccessful efforts to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election in 4 battleground states received by Joe Biden. Sauer wrote that Texas’s allegations “elevate necessary questions on election integrity and public confidence within the administration of Presidential elections,” however the justices concluded that Texas lacked a authorized proper, referred to as standing, to convey its case.

And in 2022, Sauer (together with 9 different states) challenged the Biden administration’s COVID vaccine mandate for staff in federally funded healthcare amenities. The Supreme Courtroom declined to take up his petition for assessment.   

After stepping down as Missouri’s solicitor common, Sauer shaped his personal legislation agency, the James Otis Legislation Group. James Otis was a Massachusetts protection lawyer and legislator whom Smithsonian Journal describes as “one of the vital influential protesters towards Britain’s colonial legal guidelines.” The journal additionally noticed that though Otis is commonly credited with coining the phrase “Taxation with out illustration is tyranny,” it’s an “overstatement” to take action. (Otis largely disappeared from public life within the early 1770s as a consequence of psychological well being points.)

In personal apply, Sauer has continued to litigate hot-button points. Final time period he represented Louisiana in its unsuccessful effort, joined by Missouri, to restrict the federal government’s potential to speak with social media corporations about their content material moderation insurance policies. And he at the moment represents state officers defending an Arizona legislation that bars transgender ladies and ladies from competing in faculty and faculty sports activities.

Nevertheless it was little question his work for Trump himself that helped Sauer to safe the job. Though Trump misplaced within the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in February, he appealed to the Supreme Courtroom, which agreed to take up his case and heard oral argument in late April. By a vote of 6-3, the court docket dominated that former presidents have broad immunity from felony prosecution for his or her official acts, they usually despatched the election-interference prices towards Trump again to a federal trial court docket in Washington, D.C., for U.S. District Choose Tanya Chutkan to take one other have a look at the fees towards Trump. With Trump’s victory on the polls this month, Particular Counsel Jack Smith has signaled that he’ll wind down the prosecution and step down earlier than Trump takes workplace.

Trump’s announcement that he intends to appoint Sauer got here shortly after Trump revealed that he additionally intends to appoint Todd Blanche, a felony protection lawyer who represented the president-elect at his state felony trial in New York for falsifying enterprise data, as deputy lawyer common, the second-highest-ranking job within the Division of Justice.

This text was initially printed at Howe on the Courtroom.