Donald Trump has nominated his attorney D. John Sauer, whom you may remember as the lawyer who argued that the president should be able to kill his political rivals with impunity, to be the country’s next solicitor general.
Earlier this year, Sauer helped Trump win his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court, which undermined other federal legal battles against Trump, like the time he tried to overturn the government after losing the 2020 election. Now Sauer will oversee all federal lawsuits.
In a statement Thursday, Trump lauded Sauer as the “lead counsel representing me in the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, winning a Historic Victory on Presidential Immunity, which was key to defeating the unConstitutional campaign of Lawfare against me and the entire MAGA movement.”
While representing Trump, Sauer argued that if the president ordered an assassination on his political enemies, he could not be indicted unless he had first been impeached.
When Justice Sonia Sotomayor drilled him about immunity in the case of assassinating political rivals, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical but we can see that would well be an official act.” When she asked if the same rule existed if the president executed people for “personal gain,” Sauer said that immunity still stood.
Ultimately, the court decided that the president had immunity for official acts.
Unlike many of Trump’s other picks, Sauer does have some experience qualifying him for the position. Sauer previously served as the solicitor general of Missouri from 2016 to 2023, under pro-Trump Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, both election deniers.
After the 2020 general election, Sauer filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the presidential election in several swing states over alleged mail-in voting fraud.
Sauer left the Missouri attorney general’s office in 2023 to serve as special assistant attorney general for the Louisiana Department of Justice, where he assisted them in launching a lawsuit against members of the Biden administration, aiming to prevent government officials from contacting social media platforms over First Amendment issues.
