The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed conservative lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a 52-45 vote.
One Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, voted no along with Democrats.
Dhillon will oversee criminal and civil work ranging from hate crime prosecutions and voting rights litigation, to investigating law enforcement agencies for engaging in patterns of discrimination.
Category Archives: election law biz
Travis Crum Joining as ELB Contributor
I’m very pleased to announced that Travis Crum of Wash. U. is joining ELB as a contributor. Travis has written frequent guest posts already for ELB, so he should be familiar to many of you. He’s recently tenured, and his election law scholarship has been important and already having an impact, especially on the Fifteenth Amendment’s history and doctrinal implications.
Like other ELB contributors, Travis will post when there is a topic on which he wishes to weigh in, and he will take a week or two per year as primary ELB blogger. His first week will be April 21.
Welcome Travis!
The Retirement of Michael Wines from the New York Times Leaves a Big Hole in the Democracy Beat That the Times Must Fill
Over the last eight years, veteran journalist Michael Wines did some of the most important reporting in the New York Times on the democracy beat. Rather than report on the latest day-to-day political food fights, Michael’s reporting was deep and nuanced on structural issues with American democracy, from gerrymandering, to threats to voting rights, to emerging democratic dysfunction. Michael’s work was never flashy or hyperbolic. He was an old school journalist who demonstrated that showing rather than telling would make for the most compelling copy.
I was always saddened and surprised by how little play Michael’s pieces got on the Times’ own pages, and even when he wrote a major story it often would never appear on the Times’ Politics page, which is what I check each morning for relevant political stories to cover on ELB.
Threats to our democracy are growing every day. And while there is of course so much to cover day to day in political news, Michael’s position on the democracy beat is indispensable for the paper of record. It is crucial that the Times find a journalist of Michael’s caliber to fill his shoes—and this time give the work the placement it deserves.
Best of luck to Michael in retirement. I have always enjoyed my conversations with him and his wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. In his own way, he has been a hero for democracy.
“With Orders, Investigations and Innuendo, Trump and G.O.P. Aim to Cripple the Left”
Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of President Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.
Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.
So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate. But inside the administration, there are moves to coordinate and expand the assault.
A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who requested anonymity to describe it.
Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law.
It is not unusual for partisans in Congress or their outside allies to push for investigations into political groups on the other side of the aisle.
But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Mr. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.
Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to defy that norm — including in a grievance-filled speech at the Justice Department on Friday, during which he name-checked a litany of critics and called them “horrible people,” “thugs” or “scum” — has Democrats sounding the alarm….
The billionaire Elon Musk, the top Trump donor leading the administration’s cost-cutting initiative, has appeared to encourage investigations of institutions that form the financial backbone of the left. They include ActBlue, the donation platform that helps fund virtually the entire Democratic Party and that congressional Republicans are already probing, and Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm that manages difficult-to-trace “dark money” groups that collectively have spent billions of dollars helping Democrats and their causes.
“Something stinks about ActBlue,” Mr. Musk wrote March 7 in one of several social media posts about the platform. A day later, he claimed without evidence that ActBlue was funded by Democratic megadonors including Herb Sandler, who died in 2019.
(Megan Hughes, an ActBlue spokeswoman, denied that the group was funded by the people Mr. Musk named, living or dead. “The only funders that ActBlue has are small-dollar donors that work sacrificially to fund worthy campaigns and causes,” she said in a statement.)
At the recent White House briefing, according to a person familiar with it, Mr. Walter presented research about ActBlue and major Democratic donors, leaving behind materials including copies of a book he published last year about Arabella.
Congressional officials say the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to throw its weight behind investigations of ActBlue in the House. And Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has suggested that ActBlue might have criminal exposure. He has also demanded documents from and threatened to subpoena another key company providing digital infrastructure for the left, Bonterra, which runs a crucial Democratic voter database system and supplies much of the party’s organizing software….
“CREW is a charitable organization, and that’s a political thing,” Mr. Trump said on Friday at the Justice Department, singling out Norm Eisen, a former board member, as a “vicious and violent” person who has “been after me for nine years.” (Mr. Eisen’s new group, State Democracy Defenders Fund, has also fought some of the new administration’s actions in court.)
Jordan Libowitz, a CREW spokesman, declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s mention of the group.
Personal grievance also figured heavily into directives Mr. Trump recently issued restricting access to government information and contracts for lawyers at firms associated with his critics.
The targeted firms include Perkins Coie, which was paid about $5 million by the Democratic National Committee and other party committees during the 2024 elections. It had earned Mr. Trump’s ire by facilitating funding for since-discredited research on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the D.N.C. into his team’s dealings with Russia.
Covington & Burling, which received nearly $8.6 million from the D.N.C. and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in the 2024 campaign cycle, was targeted by a presidential memorandum stripping security clearances from lawyers who represented Jack Smith, the former special counsel who pursued two separate indictments of the president in 2023.
The D.N.C. declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s moves against the law firms and its vendors, including ActBlue.
A third law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, was the subject of an executive order Friday restricting its business activities because one of its lawyers, Mark F. Pomerantz, had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago when Mr. Pomerantz worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Perkins Coie has lost “significant revenue” as a result of the order, lawyers for the firm said in a lawsuit that prompted a judge to halt parts of the order.
On Friday, Mr. Trump singled out Mr. Pomerantz and Marc Elias, a former Perkins Coie lawyer who had been the firm’s point person on the Russia research. Calling them “radicals” and “really bad people,” Mr. Trump confusingly claimed that the lawyers had “tried to turn America into a corrupt Communist and third world country.”
On MSNBC afterward, Mr. Elias said, “I’d be an idiot not to be worried.”
But he vowed to continue battling Mr. Trump. “The question is not whether we are worried,” he said, adding, “The question is what do we do.”…
“Judge blocks key provisions of Trump’s bid to punish Democratic-linked law firm”
President Donald Trump’s retaliation against a prominent Democratic-linked law firm is likely unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell blocked the Trump administration from enforcing central provisions of an executive order that seeks to punish the law firm, Perkins Coie, by barring its attorneys from interacting with federal agencies or even entering federal buildings.
Howell said the “retaliatory animus” of Trump’s order is “clear on its face” and appears to violate constitutional restrictions on “viewpoint discrimination.” The executive order, which Trump issued last week, “runs head on into the wall of First Amendment protections,” the judge concluded.
Perkins Coie, which is based in Seattle, has often represented Democratic politicians and causes, including Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Trump has long targeted the firm as a political and legal adversary for its role in commissioning the anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele in 2016. That dossier, whose salacious allegations against Trump were never confirmed by federal investigators, helped fuel the long-running probe of his 2016 campaign’s interactions with Russia.
The executive order, if allowed to take effect, would hamstring the firm’s ability to represent clients who have business with the federal government. The firm claims that Trump’s directive has already led clients to abandon the firm and is likely to prompt federal officials to cancel or deny meetings on a wide array of pending matters.
Howell noted that the order would harm not only the firm’s 1,200 lawyers — most of whom had nothing to do with the Russia probe — but its 2,500 non-lawyer employees, from IT staff to secretaries.
The judge said Trump’s order was also flawed because it was issued without any notice to the firm or due process to challenge his determination.
“This may be amusing in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where the Queen of Hearts yells, ‘Off with their heads!’ at annoying subjects … and announces a sentence before a verdict,” Howell said, “but this cannot be the reality we are living under.”…
Howell’s ruling is a temporary restraining order, meaning it blocks key provisions of the executive order while litigation continues. In emphatic remarks from the bench following an emergency hearing Wednesday, Howell expressed grave concern that Trump’s order would intimidate other law firms, discouraging them from taking on causes or people at odds with the administration.
“I am sure that many in the legal profession are watching in horror at what Perkins Coie is going through here,” said the judge, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “The order casts a chilling harm of blizzard proportions across the legal profession.”
The hearing featured an unusual appearance by the Justice Department’s chief of staff and acting No. 3 official, Chad Mizelle, who argued in defense of Trump’s order. Mizelle said Trump has largely unchecked authority to single out individuals or organizations as threatening to government interests….
Perkins Coie Web Page on Its Lawsuit Against the Trump Administration
You can find relevant documents here.
“Firm Targeted by Trump Over Clinton Campaign Work Hires Top Litigators”
NYT:
Perkins Coie, the law firm that President Trump targeted for punishment with an executive order last week for its role representing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, has hired an elite Washington firm, Williams & Connolly, to fight the order, according to four people briefed on the matter.
The decision to hire Williams & Connolly — which is considered among the most aggressive and skilled firms in fighting the federal government — marked a significant escalation in the fight between Perkins Coie and Mr. Trump.
There were concerns in the legal community that no firm would step forward to represent Perkins Coie. But now Mr. Trump’s Justice Department will be forced to face off against some of the top litigators in the country to defend what legal experts consider one of his most direct attacks on his perceived enemies, and the American legal system.
The executive order Mr. Trump signed on Thursday essentially crippled Perkins Coie’s ability to represent clients dealing with the federal government by stripping it of access to government buildings and officials. The president said he was taking the action, in part, because of Perkins Coie’s role in hiring another firm that helped create a dossier on Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia….
Legal experts and top Washington lawyers said the order targeting Perkins Coie was among Mr. Trump’s most troubling maneuvers since returning to office. Not only did it appear designed to destroy the firm, they said, it seemed intended to have a chilling effect on the entire legal profession, signaling that firms could face major consequences for simply representing an adversary of Mr. Trump.
The lawyer who served as Perkins Coie’s point person on the Russia dossier, Marc Elias, ran the firm’s political law group and served as the top lawyer for the Clinton campaign. He left the firm in 2021 to start his own firm specializing in election and voting rights law, taking with him dozens of Perkins Coie lawyers and becoming even more vocal in his criticisms of Mr. Trump.
While Perkins Coie maintained its political law practice, that is dwarfed by its work representing major corporations that generally seek to avoid political controversies of the sort generated by the dossier and Mr. Trump’s attacks….
“Meagan Wolfe can stay on as Wisconsin’s top election official, state Supreme Court rules”
What happened? The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that the state’s chief election official, Meagan Wolfe, can stay in her job even though her term has expired, heading off a yearslong effort by some Republicans to oust her.
What’s the dispute? Wolfe became the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s administrator in 2018 after working for the agency and its predecessor in other roles, and has been a holdover appointee since the summer of 2023. She is considered one of the most respected — and scrutinized — election officials nationwide, but she became a Republican target after President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 election and took heat for the commission’s decisions in administering that election.
The case focuses not on Wolfe’s performance as administrator, but rather on the legality of appointees staying on after their terms expire.
Wolfe’s four-year term expired in July 2023, and the Republican-led state Senate appeared poised to reject her confirmation if the Wisconsin Elections Commission had voted to reappoint her. All three Republicans on the commission voted to reappoint Wolfe, but the Democratic commissioners abstained from the vote. They cited a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling stating that appointees can stay in their roles past the end of their terms. That meant Wolfe wasn’t formally reappointed, and therefore not subject to another Senate confirmation proceeding. Still, Senate leaders took a vote to fire her….
“Musk Lawyer Tries to Build a Powerhouse Firm With a Billionaire Client”
Several top Republican lawyers are joining forces with the lawyer for the billionaire Elon Musk in hopes of building a new conservative legal powerhouse.
Chris Gober, a swaggering Texas-based lawyer who has represented Mr. Musk in high-profile political fights for the last year, has hired four lawyers from Holtzman Vogel, a top law firm that recently drew the ire of some allies of President Trump.
The move is yet another sign of the expanding influence of Mr. Musk in big-money Republican politics.
Mr. Musk is the Republican Party’s top donor and has become one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers. That rise has empowered those in Mr. Musk’s orbit, as well.
Mr. Gober has said that his enlarged firm, now called Lex Politica, drew inspiration from an unlikely source: Marc Elias, the Democratic Party’s own superlawyer, who has consolidated power in the Democratic legal world and influenced his party in a way that no political lawyer on the right has.
“His law firm is synonymous with the progressive movement,” Mr. Gober said of Mr. Elias in an interview. “And that’s what we want to do: Build the law firm that is synonymous with the conservative movement.”…
Some Trump advisers publicly criticized Holtzman Vogel during the 2024 campaign cycle after a top Republican lawyer at the firm, Jason Torchinsky, researched on behalf of a client whether Mr. Trump could be disqualified from the ballot using the 14th Amendment. That larger effort ultimately failed, but some Republicans now perceive Holtzman Vogel, accurately or not, as an establishment firm in a party led by a president who likes to hold grudges.
Jill Holtzman Vogel, the firm’s founder, said she wished Mr. Gober’s recruits “well” but bristled at Mr. Gober’s framing of their departure as a “coup.”
“They are taking two nonequity partners out of a 50-lawyer firm with the largest political and MAGA practice in the country,” she said….
“Texas State Bar seeks to dismiss its lawsuit against Ken Paxton for challenging 2020 presidential election”
The State Bar of Texas on Wednesday moved to drop its lawsuit against Attorney General Ken Paxton for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, extending a cascade of legal and political wins for the once-embattled Republican leader.
In a court filing, lawyers with the bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline asked the Texas Supreme Court to dismiss the suit, citing the high court’s December decision to toss a separate state bar lawsuit against Paxton’s top aide, Brent Webster, for working with Paxton to challenge the 2020 outcome in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden.
The state bar had sought to sanction Paxton, which could have carried a punishment ranging from a private reprimand to disbarment. Lawyers from the bar — which regulates law licenses in Texas — have argued that Paxton, in falsely claiming to have uncovered major evidence of election wrongdoing, forced the battleground states “to expend time, money, and resources to respond to the misrepresentations and false statements.”
The bar’s dismissal motion effectively ends a case that dates back to May 2022. It is Paxton’s second personal legal victory within the last year: In March, prosecutors dropped long-running felony securities fraud charges against Paxton under an agreement that required the attorney general to perform 100 hours of community service and take 15 hours of legal ethics courses. Paxton also agreed to pay around $271,000 in restitution to those he was accused of defrauding more than a decade ago when he allegedly solicited investors in a McKinney technology company without disclosing that the firm was paying him to promote its stock….
In its decision to dismiss the lawsuit against Webster last month, the Texas Supreme Court upheld an earlier ruling by a Williamson County district judge who said that taking Webster’s law license would violate the Texas Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine. In their motion to drop Paxton’s case, state bar lawyers acknowledged that their lawsuit against the attorney general “raises identical separation of powers issues” as those at issue in Webster’s case.
“BREAKING: SCOTUSblog Publisher Tom Goldstein Indicted In Tax Case”
Tom Goldstein, a publisher of SCOTUSblog and one of the most experienced U.S. Supreme Court lawyers in the country, was indicted Thursday in Maryland federal court on charges he schemed to evade taxes for years and used funds from his boutique law firm to cover gambling debts.
The indictment, which describes Goldstein as an “ultrahigh-stakes poker player” who played poker games involving “stakes totaling millions, and even ten of millions of dollars,” alleges that between 2016 and 2022 he carried out a scheme to “evade the assessment of taxes, file false tax returns and fail to pay his tax obligations when they were due.”
Goldstein allegedly used millions of dollars in funds from Goldstein & Russell, a boutique law firm in Bethesda, Maryland, that he solely owned, to cover gambling debts and other personal debts and falsely understated his gambling winnings by millions of dollars in tax filings, according to the indictment.
He also is accused of entering into sham employment arrangements with at least a dozen women who he was in “intimate personal relationships with” or was pursuing. Goldstein allegedly listed the women as “employees” of his law firm, paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars and set them up with health insurance policies through the firm, while they “performed little or no work for the firm.”…
Here is the indictment.
“The Good Lawyers of January 6”
W. Bradley Wendel has posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Much of the response by the community of legal ethics and professional responsibility scholars to the 2020 presidential election has been focused on the wrongs committed by lawyers like John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro, who created the alternate elector scheme to throw the decision regarding the election to the House of Representatives. Yet there was a group of lawyers, that I will refer to as the good lawyers of January 6, who forcefully and unequivocally opposed this plan, refused to cooperate in its execution, advised Vice President Mike Pence that it was not legally supportable, and in some cases threatened to resign in protest if President Trump went forward with it. These lawyers are, almost without exception, card-carrying movement conservatives, with pedigrees including clerkships for conservative Supreme Court Justices, membership in the Federalist Society, and service in prior Republican administrations. They include Greg Jacob, counsel to Vice President Pence; White House Counsel Pat Cipollone; White House Senior Advisor Eric Hershmann; retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig; Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen; and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue.
As a normative legal ethics theorist I am interested in whether there a coherent and attractive ideal or set of principles of ethical conduct by lawyers that would align with the refusal of these lawyers to advice or assist in the overthrow of the election. The answer to this question may inform the way we regulate lawyers and seek to educate and inspire law students to promote the highest ideals of the profession.
Granting that this is somewhat speculative, my hypothesis is that a commitment to the rule of law is central to the professional identity of the lawyers who refused to lend their assistance to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts. Of course, each of these lawyers may have acted for his own unique reasons, but the normative commitment shared by all of them is fidelity to the rule of law. The concept of the rule of law is, of course, a contested one in legal philosophy. Debates continue over matters such as formal or substantive definitions of the rule of law, the relationship between democracy and the rule of law, the problem of legal injustice, and whether a state that purports to respect the ideal of the rule of law must also respect certain substantive human rights. However, there may be sufficient agreement on key features of the rule of law as it bears on the ethical obligations and professional identity of lawyers. The actions of the good lawyers of January 6 serve as a kind of ostensive definition of the ideal of the rule of law as a principle of ethical lawyering. The basis for these lawyers’ advice to Vice President Pence was a judgment that the constitution and federal election law, properly interpreted, simply did not support the position urged by Eastman, Clark, and Chesebro.
“Olivas Award Goes to Harvard Law Professor Guy-Uriel Charles”
Congrats Guy and so well deserved! Release:
Guy-Uriel Charles, Faculty Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice and Charles Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is the recipient of the Michael A. Olivas Award for Outstanding Leadership in Diversity and Mentoring in the Legal Academy, a joint recognition by four AALS sections.
“I am thrilled to receive the Olivas Award,” Charles said. “It is both a privilege and responsibility to be associated with this brilliant scholar who has done so much for the legal academy and particularly for legal academics of color. I endeavor to do my best as one of the keepers of the flame.”
The annual award serves to honor the legacy of Michael A. Olivas, who died in April 2022 after an illustrious career in law, most recently serving as William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law Emeritus at the University of Houston Law Center and the Director of the University of Houston’s Institute for Higher Education Law & Governance. In 2018, Olivas was awarded the AALS Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and the Law, the association’s highest honor.
The Olivas Award is presented by the AALS Sections on Civil Rights, Education Law, Minority Groups, and Student Services. It is awarded annually to law faculty member or members who most vividly exemplify Olivas’s devotion to mentoring junior and aspiring faculty from underrepresented communities and promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity in the legal academy….
Remembering Jimmy Carter and His Legacy for Election Law
President Jimmy Carter died at 100. He was a moral, decent man, committed to the cause of justice. One of his passions was for democracy. His work with the Carter Center helped to ensure fair elections around the world.
He was involved in two commissions in the United States to improve American elections following the disputed 2000 elections that revealed serious flaws with American election administration, the Carter-Ford Commission after 2000 and the Carter-Baker commission after 2004. I had the privilege to testify before the Carter-Baker commission.
The Carter-Baker Commission report had many sound recommendations for reforms; its endorsement of voter identification laws proved controversial, and my friend Spencer Overton and others dissented in part from the recommendations (see page 89 of the report). The recommendation itself only supported voter id if if could be done in ways that did not overly burden voters and was coupled with efforts to get voters registered, a sensible basis for some bipartisan compromise.
After the attempted election subversion of the 2000 election, President Carter wrote an essay in the New York Times, I Fear for Our Democracy. His steps forward also seemed quite sensible:
First, while citizens can disagree on policies, people of all political stripes must agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law. Citizens should be able to participate easily in transparent, safe and secure electoral processes. Claims of election irregularities should be submitted in good faith for adjudication by the courts, with all participants agreeing to accept the findings. And the election process should be conducted peacefully, free of intimidation and violence.
Second, we must push for reforms that ensure the security and accessibility of our elections and ensure public confidence in the accuracy of results. Phony claims of illegal voting and pointless multiple audits only detract from democratic ideals.
Third, we must resist the polarization that is reshaping our identities around politics. We must focus on a few core truths: that we are all human, we are all Americans and we have common hopes for our communities and our country to thrive. We must find ways to re-engage across the divide, respectfully and constructively, by holding civil conversations with family, friends and co-workers and standing up collectively to the forces dividing us.
Fourth, violence has no place in our politics, and we must act urgently to pass or strengthen laws to reverse the trends of character assassination, intimidation and the presence of armed militias at events. We must protect our election officials — who are trusted friends and neighbors of many of us — from threats to their safety. Law enforcement must have the power to address these issues and engage in a national effort to come to terms with the past and present of racial injustice.
Lastly, the spread of disinformation, especially on social media, must be addressed. We must reform these platforms and get in the habit of seeking out accurate information. Corporate America and religious communities should encourage respect for democratic norms, participation in elections and efforts to counter disinformation.
He was a wise man with a great love for the United States and for the people of the world, committed to democracy and fair voting. Condolences to his family and friends.