President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to nominate John Sauer, his personal lawyer who argued his immunity case at the Supreme Court last term, to be US solicitor general.
Sauer is a former federal prosecutor who served as Missouri’s solicitor general from 2017 to 2023. In that role, he tried to intervene on behalf of Missouri and five other states in support of Texas’ unsuccessful fight to keep Trump in power by challenging the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Sauer has also been involved in other high-profile conservative battles, including challenges to the Biden administration’s efforts to cancel student debt and to combat social media misinformation regarding Covid and the 2022 mid-term election.
Sauer went on to successfully represent Trump at the Supreme Court in his bid for immunity from being criminally charged for trying to overturn the 2020 election. The justices voted 6-3 along ideological lines in July to give Trump immunity from some official acts he took as president.
Before the case got to the Supreme Court, Sauer argued at the D.C. Circuit that the president would be immune from prosecution if he ordered SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent.
Sauers’s one other Supreme Court argument was Bucklew v. Precythe, which he argued as Missouri Solicitor General. Sauer won a 5-4 victory in that case, making it harder for capital defendants to challenge their method of execution.
“John is a deeply accomplished, masterful appellate attorney, who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia in the United States Supreme Court, served as Solicitor General of Missouri for six years, and has extensive experience practicing before the U.S. Supreme Court and other Appellate Courts,” Trump said Thursday in a statement.
Federalist Reaction
Sauer’s planned nomination got applause and cheers from a crowd at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention Friday when Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) referenced it.
“John Sauer was my solicitor general,” Schmitt said while talking about his time as the Missouri’s attorney general during a conversation with former West Virginia Solicitor General Elbert Lin.
“We had stellar talent,” he said. “You can’t do the things that I wanted to do if you didn’t have hardworking smart people around you.”
With Sauer, Schmitt led the group of Republican states challenging the Biden administration’s attempt to get health-care workers vaccinated against Covid-19. The Supreme Court ultimately allowed the rule to take effect. But the court agreed to stop Occupational Safety & Health Administration rule that would have required millions of workers to get vaccinated or submit to periodic testing. Missouri had also joined Republican states in a challenge to that rule.
Luttig Clerk
Sauer, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Law graduate, also clerked for then Fourth Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig, who has since become one of Trump’s fiercest critics. Sauer later founded the James Otis Law Group in St. Louis.
The solicitor general, whose office is in the Justice Department, is responsible for litigating the federal government’s positions at the Supreme Court. Often referred to as the 10th justice, the solicitor general gives their view on pending cases when it’s asked for by the justices, and is regularly allowed to participate in arguments even when the US isn’t a party in a case.
The Biden administration has several cases pending at the court this term that won’t be resolved before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.
Sauer could immediately flip the government’s positions in those disputes, which include fights over a Tennessee law that bans certain health-care treatments for transgender minors and federal regulations for hard to trace “ghost guns” that can be built at home.
— With assistance from Kimberly Robinson
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