Kathryn Kimball Mizelle

Kathryn Kimball Mizelle is a Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge for the Middle District of Florida. The Republican-controlled Senate confirmed her even though she received a ‘Not Qualified’ rating from the American Bar Association (ABA), with the ABA standing committee pointing out that “since her admission to the bar Mizelle has not tried a case, civil or criminal, as lead or co-counsel.” At the age of 33, she was the youngest federal judge Trump appointed to a lifetime seat and was less than two-years-removed from her clerkship with Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Supreme Court. She was also part of a group of appointees confirmed after Trump lost the 2020 election, “breaking a 123-year tradition” of not confirming judicial nominees of a defeated president in a lame duck session.

After her clerkship, Mizelle joined Jones Day, which has represented Trump’s presidential campaigns and provided many administration appointments. Mizelle is a long-time member of the Federalist Society, was a leader in the D.C. chapter, and also belongs to the Leonard Leo-backed Teneo Network, a Project 2025 Advisory Board member. As reported by ProPublica, Mizelle is one of a handful of young right-wing attorneys whose careers have been nurtured by Leo. She personally knows Leo’s right-hand operative, Carrie Severino, who runs the Judicial Crisis Network and who praised Mizelle’s appointment to a lifetime position as a federal judge. In her short time on the bench, Mizelle has filed a national injunction, ruled in favor of immunity for law enforcement officers, and embraced the near absolute individual right to bear arms enshrined by Thomas.

Mizelle has an extreme view of how to interpret the Constitution, and shares some radical views with the anti-government movement. For example, when discussing her preparation for her Supreme Court clerkship at a Federalist Society event, Mizelle said, “by night I studied the original meaning of the constitution, like whether paper money is constitutional” and then asserting “It is not.” She also described Thomas as “the greatest living American.” As an aide to the Associate Attorney General, she “advised on litigation handled by the Department’s Civil and Civil Rights Divisions,” the department responsible for chipping away at civil rights, defending the Muslim travel ban, and rolling back guidance that protected transgender Americans.

In 2022, Mizelle made front-page news when she struck the federal mask mandate on airplanes and public transportation instituted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Mizelle’s ruling dealt a major blow to the Biden administration’s response to that phase of the pandemic and could create future problems. Dr. George C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called the ruling “unimaginable” because of the abruptness of the decision and Mizelle’s interpretation of the law, which could hurt the ability of the federal government to respond to future public health emergencies. At the time of her decision, Mizelle was a clear outlier among federal judges, as the Department of Justice noted in a filing in a similar lawsuit in Texas a week before Mizelle’s ruling: “The Supreme Court has thrice rejected relief, and so has every Court of Appeals to consider the issue,” the DOJ said, adding that “not a single judge or justice noted their dissent from any of these orders.”

Recently, in January 2024, Mizelle ruled that a federal law prohibiting people from carrying firearms in post offices was unconstitutional in light of Thomas’ controversial edict in NYSRPA v. Bruen. In her opinion, she cited or mentioned the Supreme Court case D.C. v. Heller, in which the Roberts Court first decreed that the Second Amendment protected an “individual right: to bear arms 18 times, but she failed to mention that the holding made an exception for “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”

Before Bruen, Mizelle also rejected a convicted felon’s challenge to a federal statute denying him the right to own a firearm, but only because she felt bound by precedent. Even though the defendant did not “raise any Second Amendment concerns,” she created that argument anyway.

Additionally, in 2022, Mizelle granted immunity to law enforcement officers in a county sheriff’s office and dismissed a suit filed by the father of two girls whose mother was killed in front of them by her ex-husband. The plaintiff alleged that the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office failed to arrest him after he tried to murder her four months earlier, or to enforce a restraining order she obtained against him. He also killed her sister, wounded one of the daughters, and killed himself. Mizelle dismissed the suit finding that the sheriff’s office’s inaction did not “shock the conscience” because the sheriff’s decision not to pursue a particular crime, in this case attempted murder, purportedly resulted from resource allocation issues that were the province of “locally elected representatives.” In her view, nor was the sheriff’s office obligated to enforce the restraining order because Florida law gives law enforcement discretion on whether to apprehend “violators of domestic violence injunctions.”

Before clerking for Thomas, Mizelle clerked for D.C. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas, himself a former Thomas clerk and partner at Jones Day. She also clerked for Eleventh Circuit Judge William H. Pryor Jr., who previously led the Republican Attorneys General Association and has defended Leo’s dark money operations at a Federalist Society event, where he mocked and insulted critics of Leo’s role in packing the bench, calling them conspiracy theorists.

Since 2016, Mizelle has been a member of the Leo-backed Teneo Network, a right-wing group that serves as a “pipeline” that places right-wing operatives in influential positions within government, politics, finance, and entertainment. Teneo is chaired by Leo. Other prominent Teneo members include Senators Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, and Representative Elise Stefanik.

Mizelle attended Covenant College, which “seek[s] to define all areas of the College’s structure and program according to th[e] understanding” that “in all things Christ [is] preeminent.” She previously attended Lakeland Christian School, whose stated mission is “to teach and demonstrate God’s truth in every subject area [from K4 through 12th grade],” and

She is married to Trump administration official Chad Mizelle, who served as Acting General Counsel to the Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has close ties to Stephen Miller. Her spouse is currently 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.