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….