FORMER STATE SOLICITORS GENERAL AND OTHER STATE AG OFFICE ATTORNEYS WHO ARE ACTIVE JUDGES

by Dan Schweitzer, Director and Chief Counsel, Center for Supreme Court Advocacy, National Association of Attorneys General

March 18, 2021

Former State Solicitors General (and Deputy Solicitors General)

Federal Courts of Appeals (11)

Jeffrey Sutton – Sixth Circuit (Ohio SG) – Tenth Circuit ( SG) – Eleventh Circuit ( SG) Allison Eid – Tenth Circuit (Colorado SG) James Ho – Fifth Circuit ( SG) S. – Fifth Circuit (Louisiana SG) Andrew Oldham – Fifth Circuit (Texas Deputy SG) – Eleventh Circuit ( SG) Eric Murphy – Sixth Circuit (Ohio SG) Lawrence VanDyke – Ninth Circuit (Montana and Nevada SG) Andrew Brasher – Eleventh Circuit (Alabama SG)

State High Courts (6)

Stephen McCullough – Virginia Supreme Court Nels Peterson – Georgia Supreme Court Gregory D’Auria – Connecticut Supreme Court John Lopez – Sarah Warren – Georgia Supreme Court Monica Marquez – (Deputy SG)

State Intermediate Appellate Courts (8)

Kent Cattani – Arizona Court of Appeals Karen King Mitchell – Court of Appeals Kent Wetherell – Florida Court of Appeals (Deputy SG) Scott Makar – Florida Court of Appeals Timothy Osterhaus – Florida Court of Appeals Peter Sacks – Massachusetts Court of Appeals Clyde Wadsworth – Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals Gordon Burns – California Court of Appeal (Deputy SG)

Federal District Court (11)

Gary Feinerman – Northern District of Illinois Brian Morris – District of Montana Daniel Domenico – District of Colorado Cam Barker – Eastern District of Texas (Deputy SG) Allen Winsor – Northern District of Florida Corey Maze –Northern District of Alabama Douglas Cole – Southern District of Ohio Lee Rudofsky – Eastern District of Arkansas Patrick Wyrick – Western District of Oklahoma Toby Crouse – District of Kansas Kristi Haskins Johnson – Southern District of Mississippi

Other Former AGO Members Who Are Now Judges

United States Supreme Court (3)

Clarence Thomas (Missouri Assistant AG) (retired) (New Hampshire AG) Sandra Day O’Connor (retired) (Arizona Assistant AG)

Federal Courts of Appeals (11)

Edward Carnes – Eleventh Circuit (Chief of Post-Litigation Division, Alabama AGO) Karen LeCraft Henderson – D.C. Circuit (Director of Criminal Division, South Carolina AGO) Judith Rogers – D.C. Circuit (DC Corporation Counsel) – Fourth Circuit (Chief of Litigation, AGO) Mike Fisher – Third Circuit (Pennsylvania AG) Jeffrey Howard – First Circuit (New Hampshire AG) William Pryor – Eleventh Circuit (Alabama AG) Kathleen O’Malley – Federal Circuit (First Assistant Attorney General, Ohio AGO) Greg Phillips – Tenth Circuit (Wyoming AG) – Fifth Circuit (Texas Deputy AG – Legal Counsel) Mark Bennett – Ninth Circuit (Hawaii AG) Federal District Courts (3)

Jack Tunheim – District of Minnesota (Chief Deputy) Laura Smith Camp – District of Nebraska (Chief Deputy for Criminal Matters) Allison Nathan – Southern District of New York (Special AAG)

State High Courts (16)

Leigh Saufley – Maine Supreme Court (Deputy AG) Donald Alexander – Maine Supreme Court (Deputy AG) Mary Ellen Barbera – Maryland Court of Appeals (Deputy Chief, Criminal Appeals) Mike McGrath – (AG) Bill Mims – Virginia Supreme Court (AG and Chief Deputy) Vanessa Ruiz – D.C. Court of Appeals (Corporation Counsel) Jeffrey Boyd – Texas Supreme Court (Deputy AG for General Litigation) – Texas Supreme Court (Deputy AG for Legal Counsel) Margaret Chutich – (Deputy AG) Geoffrey Slaughter – (Special Counsel to AG) Robert McDonald – Maryland Court of Appeals (Principal Counsel) David Thomson – (Deputy AG) – New Jersey Supreme Court (AG) Carlos Muniz – Florida Supreme Court (Deputy AG and Chief of Staff) Gordon MacDonald – New Hampshire Supreme Court (AG) Rachel Wainer Apter – New Jersey Supreme Court (Head of Civil Rights Division) (nominated)

State Intermediate Courts (31)

Kathryn Graeff – Maryland Court of Special Appeals (Chief, Criminal Division) Fred Voros – Utah Court of Appeals (Chief, Criminal Appeals) Randolph Beales – Virginia Court of Appeals (AG and Chief Deputy) Peter Siggins – California Court of Appeal (Chief Deputy) Joseph Yannotti – New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division (member of NJ AGO) Natalie Hudson – Minnesota Court of Appeals (Assistant AG, criminal appeals) Clayton Roberts – Florida Court of Appeals (Executive Deputy AG) Joseph Lewis – Florida Court of Appeals (Chief, Employment Litigation/Civil Litigation Section) Lori Rowe – Florida Court of Appeals (Deputy Chief of Staff) Thomas Winokur – Florida Court of Appeals (Assistant AG, criminal appeals) Mary Tabor – Iowa Court of Appeals (Assistant AG, criminal unit) Andy Bennett – Tennessee Court of Appeals (Chief Deputy) Jim Humes – California Court of Appeal (Chief Deputy) Fred Voros – Utah Court of Appeals (Chief of Criminal Appeals) Randy Howe – Arizona Court of Appeals (Chief, Criminal Division) Doug Kossler – Alaska Court of Appeals (Chief, Criminal Appeals) Kathryn Graeff – Maryland Court of Special Appeals (Chief, Criminal Appeals) Matthew Fader – Maryland Court of Special Appeals (Chief, Civil Litigation) Sookyoung Shin – Massachusetts Court of Appeals (Assistant AG) James Milkey – Massachusetts Court of Appeals (Chief, Environmental Protection Division) Jessica Lorello – Idaho Court of Appeals (Deputy AG) Marla Graff Decker – Virginia Court of Appeals (Deputy AG) Wesley Russell – Virginia Court of Appeals (Deputy AG) Mary Windon – Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals (Deputy AG) Paul McMurdie – Arizona Court of Appeal (Chief, Criminal Appeals) Jennifer Perkins – Arizona Court of Appeal (Assistant SG) Jeff Rose – Texas 3rd Court of Appeals (Deputy First Assistant AG) Peter Krause – California Court of Appeal (Supervising Deputy AG) Roberto Sanchez-Ramos – Puerto Rico Court of Appeals (AG and SG) Matthew Grove – Colorado Court of Appeals (Assistant SG and Senior Assistant AG) Timothy Terrell – Alaska Court of Appeals (Assistant AG) Ted Cruz Promoted Himself and Conservative Causes as Texas’ Solicito... https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/05/us/politics/ted-cruz-promoted-hi...

By JONATHAN MAHLER MARCH 4, 2016

AUSTIN, Tex. — From its start in 1999, the office of the solicitor general of Texas was run by a plain-spoken Mormon, a by-the-books lawyer known for mentoring young attorneys and defending the state, whatever the political consequences.

The young lawyers loved him. The state’s legal community hailed him as a man of dignity and integrity. And the office seldom showed up in the headlines.

But everything changed in January 2003, when Ted Cruz took over.

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Within months of his appointment to the job, Mr. Cruz, then 31, set about transforming this under-the-radar, apolitical office into an aggressively ideological, attention-grabbing one. From a nondescript government building in the shadow of the Capitol, he inserted himself into scores of politically charged cases around the country, bombarding the United States Supreme Court with amicus briefs on hot- button issues like abortion and gun control.

His focus on gaining attention clashed with the sensibilities of many of the lawyers who worked for him and were accustomed to a more scrupulous and less publicity- minded approach. Before the end of his first year, half of the eight attorneys working in the office had left, raising concern inside the attorney general’s office about whether Mr. Cruz was the right choice for the job.

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But he had the personal backing of the at the time, , who is now the state’s governor. Mr. Abbott shared Mr. Cruz’s new, activist vision for the office and gave him a broad mandate, encouraging him not only to defend Texas, but also to look across the country for opportunities to champion conservative causes.

The solicitor’s role became Mr. Cruz’s springboard, elevating him almost directly into the world of Texas politics. The conservative legal record he amassed and the connections he made in Austin helped carry him into the in 2012 and are now helping to propel his presidential candidacy. One of his biggest donors has said that he was inspired entirely by Mr. Cruz’s history as Texas’ in- house legal scholar.

“He turned a little post in Austin into a nationally significant position,” said James C. Ho, who succeeded Mr. Cruz as solicitor general.

The office also became an instrument of Mr. Cruz’s ambitions. In 2006, The Austin-American Statesman published a front-page profile of him, with the headline, “In State Politics, His Star Is Rising.”

“In the fullness of time, my plan for Ted would be for him to be the ,” said a quote in the article by Charles J. Cooper, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan administration, and one of Mr. Cruz’s political mentors.

The small team of lawyers in Mr. Cruz’s office figured his sights were set higher: They joked, even back then, about whether his Canadian birth certificate might one

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day impede his drive to be president.

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Mr. Cruz declined to be interviewed for this article, but a spokeswoman for his campaign, Catherine Frazier, noted that he was “the longest serving solicitor general in Texas history, which would not be the case if he wasn’t effective, successful and well-regarded.” Ms. Frazier attributed any criticism of his tenure to disgruntled former employees and said that staff turnover is typical with any change of administration.

It was in the fall of 2002 when Mr. Cruz, then living in Washington, heard about the opening for solicitor general. At the time, his political career was stalled. After being part of the legal team that helped hand George W. Bush his victory in the recount in 2000, he had failed to land a senior position in the White House and had been relegated to the Federal Trade Commission.

In his memoir, “Ted Cruz: A Time for Truth,” Mr. Cruz writes that he never thought he would get the solicitor general’s job, which handles all appellate litigation on behalf of the Office of the Attorney General. While his credentials were unimpeachable — he had graduated from before serving as a clerk for William H. Rehnquist — he had very little practical legal experience. He had argued just two cases, neither one at the Supreme Court. And he had never really held an executive position.

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But Mr. Abbott decided to take a risk and hire him.

Mr. Cruz was not only young and untested, he was arriving on the heels of the deeply respected Gregory S. Coleman, who had set the tone for the office before being succeeded briefly by his deputy, Julie Parsley.

A former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, Mr. Coleman collaborated closely with his small staff, most of whom had left much higher-paying jobs in the private

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sector to work alongside him. They divvied up the cases and shared the responsibilities of writing briefs and preparing oral arguments, often working weekends and even pulling all-nighters in the office when deadlines were approaching. Mr. Coleman was also personally beloved; he and his wife were known for sending monogrammed baby blankets to the young lawyers when they had children.

Mr. Cruz struck a starkly different posture, telegraphing a new set of priorities to his staff. Not long after Mr. Cruz started, he had a television installed in his office that was tuned to cable news throughout the day, the workers in the office recalled. He spent very little time discussing legal strategies with his team of lawyers. When he did visit his attorneys, he had a habit of hoisting a cowboy boot onto their desks. Mr. Cruz decorated his own office with a large portrait of himself arguing before the Supreme Court.

Hierarchy seemed important to Mr. Cruz. He instructed his secretary to refer to him on the telephone not as Ted, but as Mr. Cruz.

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Mr. Cruz’s predecessors filed only occasional friend-of-the-court briefs at the Supreme Court, perhaps three a year. Mr. Cruz filed more than 70 in his five-and- a-half-year tenure, from supporting Nebraska’s right to ban a late-term abortion procedure to opposing an effort to restrict the ownership of handguns in Washington.

The focus on Supreme Court cases that did not directly involve Texas dismayed some of the lawyers on the staff, who felt the office was losing its legal and ethical rigor in favor of politics and seeking headlines.

One incident that a couple of Mr. Cruz’s lawyers found especially troubling arose during Medellín v. Texas, which he has described as the biggest case of his tenure. In a sense, it was a relatively minor issue — one including a cartoon character — but it was memorable to those who worked in the office.

The case involved two teenage girls in who were raped and murdered. One of the victims was wearing a watch featuring Goofy, the Disney character. According to two lawyers who worked in the office at the time, Mr. Cruz wanted to describe it as a Mickey Mouse watch in his brief to the Supreme Court because he thought it would make for a more powerful image for the justices. The two lawyers requested anonymity because they remain active in the Texas legal community, where Mr. Cruz has great influence.

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“People were really shocked,” said one of the lawyers. “He wanted to misrepresent the record — to lie — for rhetorical or dramatic effect.”

The office’s first brief before the Supreme Court, filed in 2005, describes the grisly scene of José Medellín and his fellow gang members dividing up the money and jewelry taken from the two dead girls: “Medellín’s brother kept one of the girls’ Mickey Mouse watch.”

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When the case returned to the court two years later, Mr. Cruz apparently had a change of heart. The reference in his brief was now to a “Disney-brand Goofy watch.”

Mr. Cruz said through his spokeswoman that he had no recollection of the episode.

While Mr. Cruz devoted little time to winning over the lawyers on his staff, he devoted himself to deepening his relationship with Mr. Abbott.

When he first took the job, the offices of the solicitor general were a few blocks from that of the attorney general. Eager to be closer to the center of power, Mr. Cruz lobbied successfully to have his offices moved into the same building. He kept a corner office on the seventh floor with his team of lawyers, but took a second office one floor up, down the hall from the attorney general, displacing its occupant.

Mr. Cruz’s spokeswoman said that Mr. Abbott had requested that Mr. Cruz move closer to him.

Over time, Mr. Cruz became one of Mr. Abbott’s most trusted advisers. “Politically, they were very much aligned,” said Edward D. Burbach, a deputy attorney general during those years.

After the Supreme Court agreed to hear a lawsuit over whether the state could display the Ten Commandments on a monument at the Capitol, Mr. Cruz urged Mr. Abbott to argue the case, and helped him prepare for it.

“He really was a very senior and trusted adviser,” said Daniel Hodge, who worked

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for Mr. Abbott at the time and is now his chief of staff.

Mr. Abbott has since endorsed Mr. Cruz’s presidential bid.

As his profile in Austin rose, Mr. Cruz made no secret of his intention to run for office. He had grown up in Texas, but he had not lived there since leaving for college at Princeton. He asked Mr. Burbach and others to introduce him to deep- pocketed conservative Texans, and he spent a lot of his time away from the office speaking at conservative legal and political events around the state.

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He was defining himself not simply as a conservative, but as a thorn in the side of the Republican establishment, most notably suing the George W. Bush administration in the Medellín v. Texas case.

The suit challenged an order issued to Texas by the president to review the conviction of Mr. Medellín, the Mexican citizen who had been accused of raping and killing the two teenage girls in Houston, because he had not been granted his right to contact the Mexican Consulate as guaranteed by the Vienna Conventions.

It would have been easy enough for Texas to comply with the president’s ruling, which merely required that Mr. Medellín be given a hearing to try to prove that his case had been hurt by this omission. But for Mr. Cruz, the case provided an opportunity to take the federal government to court on behalf of Texas’ sovereignty. He won, 6 to 3.

When Mr. Cruz left the solicitor general’s office in the spring of 2008 to join a law firm in Houston, just about everyone who knew him figured it was only a matter of time before he ran for office. As it happened, it was a matter of months. Mr. Cruz began campaigning at the start of 2009 to replace Mr. Abbott, who was planning to run for lieutenant governor, as Texas’ attorney general.

Mr. Cruz’s timing initially seemed ideal. Texas was moving sharply to the right. What is more, his campaign coincided with the emergence of the Tea Party, whose raucous, antigovernment crowds provided a natural constituency for a politician who could cast himself as a crusader for liberty against an overreaching government.

“The most fundamental ethos in the state of Texas is, ‘Give me a horse and a gun and an open plain, and I can conquer the world,’ ” Mr. Cruz told people at a Tea Party rally in East Texas on July 4, 2009. “That’s the spirit that’s under assault

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right now today in Washington.”

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That summer, Mr. Cruz flew to Maine in search of the support of at least one establishment Republican, former President George Bush. In his memoir, Mr. Cruz writes that Mr. Bush, who was 85 at the time, enthusiastically agreed to endorse him, but that when he returned to Texas, he received an angry phone call from Karl Rove, the Republican political consultant. According to Mr. Cruz, some major donors to the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas were supporting one of Mr. Cruz’s opponents for attorney general and were furious at Mr. Rove for allowing the 41st president to support Mr. Cruz.

Mr. Rove disputes this account. He said Mr. Cruz deliberately misled Mr. Bush, failing to mention that he would probably face Republican opponents in the primary who were close friends of the Bush family.

“He didn’t shoot straight with the former president,” Mr. Rove said in an interview.

Mr. Cruz abandoned his bid for attorney general in late 2009, when Mr. Abbott decided to run for re-election. But he had jump-started his political career, raising more than $1.5 million in less than a year. Many of these same contributors are now donating large sums to his presidential campaign.

“In the end, it worked out for the best,” said John Drogin, who worked on Mr. Cruz’s campaign for attorney general. “Just about a year later, we filed to run for the Senate.”

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Vice President Mike Pence's private political considerations cost the administration a chance to elevate a fresh conservative to the federal bench. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

WHITE HOUSE Why Pence spiked a Trump judge The rare split between the president and his loyal sidekick offers a window into the vice president's independent political ambitions.

By ELIANA JOHNSON | 07/12/2019 05:03 AM EDI

In January 2018, Judge Michael Kanne received an unexpected call from the White House. Kanne, an Indiana native who sits on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, was then 79 years old.

Under leadership of Don McGahn, the White House counsel's office was focused almost singularly on filling the federal bench with conservative judges, and in Kanne, Trump's lawyers had spotted an opportunity to nudge out an old-timer and lock in a conservative who could serve on the federal bench for decades to come. Rob Luther, a McGahn deputy responsible for nominations, had phoned Kanne to suggest he retire. Luther told the judge the White House had a successor in mind: Tom Fisher, Indiana's solicitor general and a former clerk for Kanne.

"I had not intended to take senior status because that wasn't my plan, but if I had a former clerk who had the chance to do it, then I would," Kanne said in an interview. "On the consideration that he would be named, I sent in my senior status indication to the president."

To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing, you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more Accept X about the cookies we use. As solicitor general of Indiana, Fisher had defended Gov. Mike Pence's policies in court, and aides to the now-vice president feared his nomination would dredge up events and information politically damaging to Pence.

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In a series of tense conversations with the White House counsel's office, Pence's lawyers, Matt Morgan and Mark Paoletta, and his then chief of staff, Nick Ayers, objected to Fisher's nomination, which died before it ever became a reality. Pence himself was kept apprised of the conversations.

The clash provides a rare glimpse into the vice president's political calculations and ambitions, which he has been excruciatingly careful to conceal since signing on to the Trump ticket in the summer of 2016.

In this case. Pence's private political considerations cost the administration a chance to elevate a fresh conservative to the federal bench when Kanne, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, revoked his senior status upon learning that Fisher wouldn't be nominated to replace him.

"A number of weeks later, I got a phone call from [Fisher] saying, 'It's off, I'm not going to be named,'" Kanne said. "And I said, 'If you're not going to be named, then I'm not going to take senior status.'"

The virtually unprecedented move turned heads in legal circles at the time, but the backstoiy went unreported.

Pence almost never airs any disagreements with the president, even in private, and lavishes him with praise in public. Since Trump's inauguration, he has worked to position himself as the president's natural heir.

Like most vice presidents, he has packed his calendar with political events, but Trump's disinterest in some of the routine aspects of coalition building have provided an opening for Pence to build his own base of support. Pence has regularly hosted dinners at the Naval Observatory for conservative movement leaders and played a central role in convening White House gatherings focused on religious liberty and opposition to abortion.

He also has embraced the role of sweet-talking deep-pocketed GOP benefactors, serving as the chief conduit between the administration and Republican donors the president has shown little interest in cultivating.

Pence has remained heavily involved with judicial nominations in his home state, and neither McGahn nor his deputies had consulted with the vice president's office before striking the tentative deal with Kanne, a breach of protocol that rankled Pence and his aides, particularly Paoletta, who had a fraught relationship with McGahn.

Of particular concern to the vice president's team was Fisher's involvement in the litigation surrounding Pence's attempt to stop Syrian refugees from settling in Indiana after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris — a move that ultimately was knocked down in court.

A three-judge panel on the 7th Circuit ripped into Fisher's defense of the Pence policy in an unusually vicious manner when he attempted to convince the court that the state had a legitimate concern about the federal government's ability to vet Syrian refugees — and that they should instead be sent to other states.

"Honestly, you are so out of it," Judge Richard Posner, who has since retired from the bench, told Fisher during the proceeding. "You don't think there are dangers from other countries?" The Pence administration was handed a stinging legal defeat in September 2016, while the then-governor was on the campaign trail with Trump.

Pence had been elected governor of Indiana in November 2012, following stints as a radio talk show host and a member of Congress. His tenure in Indianapolis was tumultuous and hit a low point in the spring of 2015 when he signed the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, a move cheered by religious conservatives but slammed by liberals and many businesses. A fix to the law passed by the Indiana Legislature left both groups unsatisfied, and Pence was in the midst of a difficult reelection battle when Trump tapped him as his running mate in July 2016.

Fisher, who became Indiana's first solicitor general in 2005 under the state's previous Republican governor, Mitch Daniels, continued on under Pence.

"The political issues that had been very controversial in Indiana while Pence was governor Fisher had also been very involved in because he was solicitor general, and that nomination would reignite those battles — and they could potentially embarrass the vice president," said a former administration official involved in the conversations surrounding Fisher's potential nomination.

Fisher did not respond to a request for comment.

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