SCOTUS NEWS
by Amy Howe
on 15 November 2024
at 12:18 p.m
D. John Sauer argued on behalf of Donald Trump before the Supreme Court in April Trump against the United States. (William Hennessy)
President-elect Donald Trump announced 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 assistant United States attorney.
Trump made the announcement in a statement Thursday night, calling Sauer a “profoundly accomplished, masterful appellate attorney.”
The 50-year-old Sauer has many of the credentials associated with others who have served as the nation’s top Supreme Court lawyer. A Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Harvard Law School, he clerked on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit for Judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative star who has since become an outspoken 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 Missouri’s attorney general, a job he held for six years — and one that allowed him to take conservative and sometimes controversial positions.
During that time he appeared for the first time as a lawyer at the Supreme Court. IN Bucklew v. Precythehe successfully defended the state’s lethal injection protocol against a challenge by an inmate who argued that executing him would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment because of the likelihood that he would end up suffocating in his own blood.
In December 2020, Sauer led a group of states in filing a “friend of the court” brief supporting Texas’ failed efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 elections in four battleground states won by Joe Biden. Sauer wrote that Texas’ claims “raise important questions about election integrity and public confidence in the administration of presidential elections,” but the justices concluded that Texas lacked a legal right, known as standing, to bring its case.
And in 2022, Sauer (along with nine other states) challenged the Biden administration’s COVID vaccine mandate for workers in federally funded health care facilities. The Supreme Court declined to entertain his petition for review.
After retiring as Missouri’s attorney general, Sauer formed his own law firm, the James Otis Law Group. James Otis was a Massachusetts defense attorney and legislator whom Smithsonian Magazine describes as “one of the most influential protesters against Britain’s colonial laws.” The magazine also noted that while Otis is often credited with coining the phrase “Taxation without representation is tyranny”, it is an “exaggeration” to do so. (Otis largely disappeared from public life in the early 1770s due to mental problems.)
In private practice, Sauer has continued to litigate on hot-button issues. Last term, he represented Louisiana in its failed effort, along with Missouri, to limit the government’s ability to communicate with social media companies about their content moderation policies. And he is currently representing state officials defending an Arizona law barring transgender women and girls from competing in college and high school sports.
But it was undoubtedly his work for Trump himself that helped Sauer secure the job. Although Trump lost in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in February, he appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to take up his case and heard oral argument in late April. In a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts, and sent the election interference charges against Trump back to a federal trial in Washington, DC, before 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 up the prosecution and resign 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 New York state criminal trial for forgery of business registers, as deputy attorney general. the second highest ranked job in the Ministry of Justice.
This article was originally published on Howe on the Court.
