John Sauer
It would depend on the hypothetical. We can see that could well be an official act. John Sauer in response to Justice Sotomayor’s question “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” Oral arguments in Donald J. Trump v. United States
John Sauer is an anti-abortion attorney who represented Donald Trump in his immunity claims. Sauer, a former solicitor general of Missouri, has routinely used his power to attack reproductive rights. In 2019, he defended the state health department’s effort to revoke the license for Missouri’s only abortion clinic; the state had monitored some patients’ period data. In 2021, he filed an amicus brief for the Missouri attorney general, signed by sixteen other states, in support of a sweeping Arizona law that outlawed abortions based on genetic fetal abnormalities.
Sauer was Trump’s lawyer in Trump in Trump v. U.S., in which the former president claimed he is immune from prosecution for crimes he has been indicted on for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Sauer asked courts to embrace Trump’s sweeping absolute immunity argument, and even suggested that presidential immunity could cover the assassination of a political rival. On July 1, 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in the case, embracing a vast expansion of presidential power, granting U.S. presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution, including absolute immunity for acts that fall under their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.”
Sauer is a former solicitor general of Missouri for which he filed numerous briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court, including a motion on behalf of Missouri in support of Texas’ attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He was appointed to that post by then-Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, who as U.S. Senator sought to block the counting of the Electoral College votes in the 2020 election. Sauer has contributed heavily to Hawley’s political campaigns. In 2019, it was revealed that Jay Ashcroft’s staff allowed Sauer to sit in on interviews as part of an investigation into whether Hawley violated election laws.
Sauer clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, and he is routinely featured by the Federalist Society to which he has also donated to the group. Sauer was also a silver-level sponsor, alongside Leonard Leo, at an exclusive 2018 George Mason University law school dinner that honored Scalia for whom the school was renamed after a $30 million deal brokered by Leo in 2016.
An anti-abortion zealot, Sauer routinely used the power of the Solicitor General’s office to attack reproductive rights during his six-year tenure. In 2019, as an Assistant Attorney General, Sauer defended the state health department’s effort to revoke the license for Missouri’s only abortion clinic. “As part of that case, it came out that the agency had been tracking the menstrual cycles of the Planned Parenthood’s patients, supposedly in order to determine if any had failed abortion procedures,” as reported by Rolling Stone.
In 2021, Sauer filed an amicus brief for the Missouri attorney general, signed by sixteen other states, in support of a sweeping Arizona law that outlawed abortions based on genetic fetal abnormalities.
Sauer defended a similar Missouri law, HB 126, before the U.S. Supreme Court that also banned abortion after the eighth week of pregnancy, even though most people do not realize they are pregnant until between the sixth and eighth week of pregnancy.
In 2015, Sauer represented an anti-abortion group called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) which sought to release deceptive, heavily edited videos they produced attacking Planned Parenthood, in an effort to defund the nonprofit. That year Leonard Leo and his right-hand man Jonathan Bunch advised CMP on “how to ensure successful prosecutions” against Planned Parenthood. The National Abortion Federation successfully won an injunction stopping CMP from distributing information it illegally obtained; a cert petition about that injunction was recently denied.
Sauer also recently gave $20,000 to a group called “Missouri Stands with Women,” a coalition opposing a ballot measure in the state that would restore abortion rights. Sauer’s contribution is nearly a quarter of the group’s publicly disclosed funding, as of April this year. He also gave $150,000 to Missouri Right to Life in 2024. (Sauer’s father has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Missouri Roundtable for Life, a group launched in 2006. Sauer’s grandfather was a member of the far-right John Birch Society.)
Sauer has also been an attorney with the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), according to a post published by the group’s website. EPPC is a right-wing 501(c)(3) that actively attacks reproductive rights and is a Project 2025 Advisory Board Member. Leo is on its board of directors. Notoriously, EPPC’s then-leader Ed Whelan worked with CRC Public Relations during Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Court. Whelan attempted to smear Dr. Christine Blasey Ford using Zillow to claim that she misremembered who sexually assaulted her and where, a claim that was widely derided before Whelan retracted it and took a leave of absence from EPPC in response. EPPC has been involved in judicial nominations since at least 1997, when it deployed Alex Acosta to assail Clinton administration nominees.
Notably, Sauer’s co-counsel in the immunity case is Will Scharf, who is primarying Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Dan Bailey. Scharf was previously a Vice President at Leo’s CRC Advisors and his candidacy has been backed by millions of dollars from Leo’s Concord Fund.