When Missouri lawyer Chuck Hatfield appeared at a 2019 hearing to represent planning parents in the fight to maintain licenses at the state's lonely surgical abortion clinic, he was told that he was a state lawyer general, D. I was surprised to see a familiar face against him at John Sauer.
It was an administrative hearing, not a high stakes trial, but Missouri's top appeals counsel, Sauer, had not sent his lieutenant. Instead, he came to argue that planning parents' licenses should not be renewed due to cases of multiple complications caused by abortion. Mr Sauer lost the hearing, but he was preparing for the fight.
“He actively sue the case,” Hatfield said.
Sauer, 50, has now been elected President Trump as U.S. Attorney General – a Supreme Justice Department official representing the federal government in discussions before the Supreme Court – first attracted public attention last year when Trump represented Trump in a presidential immunity case. He presented a bold argument. The former president could have been spared from the prosecutors even if he ordered Seal Team 6 to assassinate his political rival.
The example elicited protests at the time, but Hatfield said he felt it was typical of long-standing conservative causes, particularly Sauer, a particularly assertive litigator for abortion.
“The other lawyers probably won't take a stretch position, but John will go ahead and take them,” Hatfield said.
On Thursday, the Senate identified Sauer, ages 52 to 45, and took on Trump's aggressive attempt to intervene in the Supreme Court in a string of cases in which a lower court judge temporarily blocked the administration's agenda.
Sauer's confirmation puts him in a position sometimes referred to as “the 10th Judiciary.” He will also become one of Trump's defense lawyers selected to hold a senior position at the Justice Department.
Sauer's same-sex marriage, access to birth control and access to transgender girls in women's sports may seem like a simple fit for the Trump administration. However, his past commitment to his past abortion lawsuit may prove a high-wire act with the president facing tricky political calculations on abortion.
Despite overturning constitutional protections against abortion and appointing three justices to assert their decisions, Trump has pledged to soften his abortion status during his 2024 campaign and rejecting a state ban. In December, he said he would not ask the FDA to block access to abortion medications.
Abortion restrictions could return to court as anti-abortion groups continue to push forward to limit access to procedures. Justice heard two challenges to abortion last year — attempts to limit access to widely available abortion medications and challenges to the near-consensual ban on abortion in Idaho — it appears that abortion opponents are likely to continue to have test cases before the 6-3 super majority of courts.
“Sauer may have to decide how many team players he wants to be if the administration isn't as strict as he has stated, but that strikedancy may want it,” said Lincoln Kaplan, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School.
The role was originally thought to be independent of politics, but in recent decades, the lawyer general has more closely aligned with the president, Kaplan said. He said he saw Sauer's appointment as “a big next step in the spectrum of politically compatible lawyer generals.”
Sauer did not respond to requests for comment.
Abortion rights rights groups said they are seeing Sauer's nomination with concern, but despite Trump's mixed message on abortion, the Justice Department is worried that it is being led by abortion rights opponents. These include Attorney General Pam Bondy, who supported abortion restrictions as Florida Attorney General and challenged the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which requires most health plans to cover birth control.
“Together, they are in a position to cause serious and long-standing damage to their reproductive rights,” said Freyre Reedlin, senior federal policy advisor at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Unlike other lawyers who have worked in recent years, Sauer spent much of his career in his hometown of Missouri, not in Washington's top companies or academia.
He grew up in St. Louis with a politically connected and wealthy Catholic family. His father, Fred, a businessman who became governor, founded Missouri Roundtable for his life, an organization focused on abortion and embryonic stem cells research. Phyllis Schullafrie, a conservative anti-abortion activist, was a family friend who praised young Sauer as a “great young lawyer” for his legal writings against same-sex marriage.
At St. Louis Priory School, an all-boy private school run by Benedictine monks, Sauer had a reputation as a sturdy student dedicated to conservative values.
“He wasn't defeated,” said former classmate Tim O'Connell, who is now a Missouri lawyer.
Sauer qualified as an elite student, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and at Harvard Law, where he served as editor of legal examinations.
Judge J. Michael Luttig selected Mr. Sauer as one of the law clerks. As many of his store clerks continued to work in the Supreme Court, an honorable position became more desirable.
Judge Luttig has become an outspoken critic of Trump, but he highly praised the former clerk, particularly on January 6, 2021, for his role in the attack on the Capitol.
“He's intellectually honest,” Justice Luttig said of Mr. Sauer. “He is true and he is a sincere person. These are the most important qualities of the lawyer general.”
After that, after secretary for Judge Antonin Scalia, Sauer went on to Cooper & Kirk, an influential, conservative Washington law firm, less than two years before returning to Missouri as federal prosecutors in 2008. In 2015 he founded his own company, the James Otis Law Group. The James Otis Law Group is named after an early American lawyer who supported a restricted government and opposed British measures that allowed law enforcement officials to search for private property.
That year he represented a group of activists at the Center for Anti-Abortion Medical Progress, who was sued after secretly recording planned parent-child meetings with the National Federation of Abortion and releasing a video aimed at showing human trafficking with fetal parts. The National Abortion Federation accused them of carrying out a conspiracy aimed at harassing abortion providers.
He also represented the Catholic theologian in a lawsuit before the Supreme Court, claiming that he would not have to pay insurance to cover contraception.
In 2017, newly elected Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley invited him to lunch at the Cracker Barrel. On top of the chicken fried steak, Mr. Holy made a pitch.
“I said, 'John, you have the ability and record to become a US lawyer general, but would you consider becoming a Missouri Attorney General?”
Under Holy, the office sought restrictions on abortion access, including a 2019 lawsuit against planned custody. The effort attracted national attention after a director of the Missouri Department of Health testified that he created a spreadsheet to track the menstrual cycles of planned parent-child patients in order to identify “failed abortions.”
In an email statement, Holy said Sauer was his “friend” and would make a “great” lawyer general.
Sauer also defended state laws aimed at blocking Medicaid funds from going to planned parent-child relationships.
Meanwhile, he participated in several training sessions for the conservative legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom, according to information provided by Sauer during the verification process. The group has led many of the legal challenges to abortion, including a case that challenged the Food and Drug Administration's approval of abortion drugs last year.
The Supreme Court rejected the case and found that the doctors and anti-abortion medical groups who filed the case failed to show that they were directly injured. However, justice did not resolve the question of whether tablets are available.
In 2019, Sauer traveled to Cancun, Mexico to an event organized by the group for senior staff at the State Attorney General's Office. He appeared on a panel called “Reading During Tea Leaves: The Way to Beyond Pro-Life Litigation.”
A few weeks after the Supreme Court overturned its constitutional right to abortion in the 2022 DOBBS v. Jackson Women's Health Agency case, Sauer once again spoke at a group-organized summit, this time at a state-level effort to further limit abortion.
In January 2023, he returned to private practice, both in the Immunity and New York civil case, where Trump determined he was liable for sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s' dressing room.
During Sauer's confirmation hearing, Democrats focused on Trump's work and questioned whether they would place loyalty to the president before the constitution. In December, Sauer presented an extraordinary summary as Trump's personal lawyer in a Supreme Court case regarding whether national security needs to be protected.
The brief argued that after Trump announced Sawer as his lawyer's general's choice, the judiciary should temporarily block laws requiring consolidation, the parent company of Tiktok, Tiktok's parent company.
“Only President Trump has the expertise to make the perfect deal,” writes Sauer to resolve the issue.
The judge rejected these arguments and unanimously supported the law.
But even as he moved forward as Trump's personal lawyer, Sauer continued to fight abortion. Missouri Ethics Committee records show that he contributed $777,000 to a group opposed to a voting measure aimed at ensuring abortion access in the state. He was one of the biggest donors to those groups.
Julie Tate Contributed research.
