Chad Mizelle

Announced as Trump’s pick for Chief of Staff to the Attorney General

Chad Mizelle is an attorney who worked on Trump’s hardline immigration agenda. He is currently the Chief Legal Officer of Affinity Partners, Jared Kushner’s investment firm that was staked with $2 billion from “the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund,” the Public Investment Fund, after Kushner used his role in the Trump White House to befriend and aid Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Mizelle started off as an attorney volunteer for the Trump campaign in 2016, reporting what he asserted were illegal voting procedures in Philadelphia. After stints in leadership posts at the DOJ and the White House Counsel’s Office, Mizelle took a senior role at DHS, and was ultimately appointed the Acting General Counsel to Acting Secretary Chad Wolf. While working in the Trump administration, Mizelle developed close ties to Stephen Miller and together they drafted some of the most hardline anti-immigration and border security policies in recent history. Mizelle is on Miller’s list of “general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.”

After volunteering for the Trump campaign in 2016, Mizelle was rewarded with a political appointment as Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. Mizelle worked for the DAG while the Justice Department was embroiled in controversy over appointing a special counsel to oversee the investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, over Trump’s objections and after Trump summarily fired FBI Director James Comey. It is not known if Mizelle helped Rosenstein craft the memo attacking Comey that was used as the pretext for terminating Comey, who had failed to pledge loyalty to Trump.

During that same period, DOJ also defended Trump’s extreme changes to immigration policy, including its travel ban, known as the “Muslim ban.” The extent of Mizelle’s roles in these policies is not known; however, DOJ calendars obtained by FOIA show that in June 2017 Mizelle met with NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation, a group that seeks to drastically reduce both legal and illegal immigration. Numbers USA is one of three anti-immigration organizations that the Southern Poverty Law Center dubbed “The Nativist Lobby” that “have the ear of conservative politicians all over the country, and their efforts have inspired many of the hard-line federal, state and local initiatives cracking down on immigrants and immigration.”

The following year, Mizelle moved over to the White House as Associate Counsel. The scope of his activities in 2018 is unknown. In 2019, he was tapped to become Deputy General Counsel at DHS, as it was in the midst of controversy over its policies of separating migrant children from their families when caught at the border, caging undocumented immigrants, and more. He moved quickly from that post to Chief of Staff to Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, and then Mizelle became Wolf’s Acting General Counsel, overseeing a staff of over 2,500 attorneys. At the time of his appointment, American Oversight Executive Director, Austin Evers noted that “by putting a lawyer with little overall experience and no direct experience [into the role of general counsel of the DHS], it is reasonable to conclude that his qualifications are loyalty to the President and his ability to carry out Stephen Miller’s agenda.”

Not long after both of their appointments in November 2019, Mizelle and Wolf met with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigration group designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. After the meeting, Mizelle thanked FAIR for reaching out and relayed that Wolf “enjoyed the dialogue.” He then expressed their excitement at working with FAIR and said if they “need anything from [him], please do not hesitate to call.”

After Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Mizelle drafted the Sanctuary for Americans First Enactment agreements, which aimed to hamstring the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Just a few days after Biden took office, a Trump-appointed U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of Texas temporarily blocked the deportation moratorium Biden put in place on his first day in office, claiming the order violated the agreements signed by Texas.

Since the end of Trump’s term, Mizelle has navigated a number of roles within government and the private sector. Jones Day hired Mizelle to be Of Counsel in its government affairs practice in Miami and D.C. That same year, as Leonard Leo was advising Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on judicial selection, DeSantis tapped Mizelle for a Tampa-area judicial nominating commission. Mizelle was also the special guest speaker at the Tampa Bay Catholic Lawyers Guild’s Red Mass, praising the Dobbs case while it was pending before the U.S. Supreme Court in the agenda to overturn Roe v. Wade and federal constitutional protection for access to abortion. In reference to the pending decision, Mizelle exclaimed, “we’re praying for wisdom, we’re praying for courage, we’re praying that the Holy Spirit will guide our decisions. And [Dobbs], above all other decisions, is one we need the Holy Spirit to guide us.” Mizelle later joined Kushner’s investment firm. Previously, Mizelle was a Blackstone Legal Fellow for the Alliance Defending Freedom and also clerked for the Bioethics Defense Fund where he worked on abortion bans.

Chad Mizelle is married to Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, 36, U.S. District Judge for the Middle District of Florida and Federalist Society member.