Jennifer Mascott

Jennifer Mascott was a lawyer in Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ), serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel and Associate Deputy Attorney General. While in the administration, she played a role in getting Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court while Americans were voting Trump out of office. Earlier in her career, Mascott clerked for Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit.

Mascott is currently the co-director of the C. Boyden Gray Center (the CBGC or Center) for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where she is an assistant professor. In her work at the Center, which has been funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, she has called Thomas “one of the leading jurists of the 20th and 21st centuries” and hosted a ceremony awarding right-wing federal judge Laurence Silberman with a newly created award called the “Justice Clarence Thomas First Principles Award.”

The school and Boyden Gray Center boast close relationships to the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society and Leonard Leo, the “prime architect of a grand project…to transform the federal judiciary and further the legal imperatives of the right,” who helped secure $30 million to rename the law school after Justice Scalia. Under Mascott’s stewardship, they have co-hosted events with both the American Enterprise Institute–a right-wing nonprofit that includes Harlan Crow and Dick DeVos, former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ husband, on the board–and the Manhattan Institute, a think-tank that pushes right-wing ideologies and includes Paul Singer and Crow’s wife Kathy on the board and that counts Rebekah Mercer as one of its top donors.

As Co-Director of the CBGB, Mascott co-wrote an amicus brief for the plaintiffs in Loper v. Raimondo, seeking to “unequivocally abandon the contemporary Chevron deference doctrine,” which will undermine agency expertise to issue regulations protecting public well-being. Mascott has also sought to thwart ethics reforms for the U.S. Supreme Court by asserting that the Senate’s efforts to address the ethics crisis caused by political partisans giving luxury gifts to Justice Thomas and others on the Court would undermine “an impartial judiciary.” She has also hosted a Religious Liberty Conference–with a panel discussion by Roger Severino, another Trump administration official who has sought to ban access to abortion.

She previously worked for Consovoy McCarthy, a Leo-tied law firm where half the partners are former Thomas clerks and which has assailed an array of legal precedents, including affirmative action policies.