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    How a Corporate Law Firm Led a Political Revolution

    On a balmy Saturday night in June, Traci Lovitt hosted a 50th birthday party for her husband, Ara, at their 9,800-square-foot Westchester mansion overlooking Long Island Sound. The couple met while clerking for Supreme Court justices: Traci for Sandra Day O’Connor, Ara for Antonin Scalia. These days, Ara worked in finance. Traci was a top partner at — and a contender to one day run — the international law firm of Jones Day, best known for representing Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. To serve as M.C. for the event, the Lovitts flew in Richard Blade, the veteran disc jockey Ara listened to while growing up in Southern California. But Blade wasn’t the party’s biggest star. That distinction belonged to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.One day earlier, Barrett and four of her colleagues on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion. Now she was wearing a pink dress and sitting at a flower-bedecked table under a tent on the Lovitts’ lush lawn. Barrett clerked for Scalia in the same session as Ara, in 1998 and 1999, and also became friends with Traci, jogging together around the National Mall after work. (When Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court in 2020, Traci wrote to senators, praising the judge’s fair-mindedness and commitment to the rule of law.) But the connection to the court ran deeper than that. Scalia had spent years at Jones Day in the 1960s. And Traci ran an elite practice inside the firm that was focused in part on arguing cases before Barrett and her colleagues. Guests at the Lovitts’ estate danced to Blade’s beats until 1 a.m. At one point, an attendee spotted Barrett chatting with Noel Francisco, another Jones Day partner, who had himself clerked for Scalia the year before Lovitt and Barrett. Francisco left the firm in 2017 to become Trump’s solicitor general, responsible for representing the government before the Supreme Court, and returned in 2020, eventually taking over Jones Day’s enormous Washington office. Now his and Lovitt’s underlings were appearing regularly before the court. In one recent case brought by Jones Day, the court killed the Biden administration’s moratorium on home evictions during the pandemic. Less than a week after the Lovitts’ party, in another case Jones Day worked on, the court would severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of power-plant emissions.For much of its history, Jones Day was a juggernaut in the field of corporate litigation. A global goliath with more than 40 offices and about 2,500 lawyers, it raked in billions a year in fees from tobacco, opioid, gun and oil companies, among many other giant corporations in need of a state-of-the-art defense. More than most of its competitors, the firm had an army of litigators who had perfected the art of exploiting tiny legal wrinkles, of burying outmatched opponents in paperwork and venue changes and procedural minutiae. But over the past two decades, Jones Day has been building a different kind of legal practice, one dedicated not just to helping Republicans win elections but to helping them achieve their political aims once in office. Chief among those aims was dismantling what Don McGahn — the Jones Day partner who helped run Trump’s campaign and then became his White House counsel — disparagingly referred to as the “administrative state.” To do that, the firm was bringing all the ruthless energy and creativity of corporate law to the political realm.Jones Day lured dozens of young Supreme Court clerks, mostly from conservative justices, with six-figure signing bonuses and the opportunity to work on favored causes, including legal challenges to gun control and Obamacare. The firm allotted countless pro bono hours to aiding the needy — and also to assisting deep-pocketed right-wing groups as they fought against early voting and a federal corporate-oversight body.Representing Trump’s 2016 campaign, Jones Day helped him solidify Republican support by pledging to pick federal judges from a list that was vetted in advance by the law firm and the Federalist Society. When Trump won, a large fleet of Jones Day lawyers sailed into his White House, the Justice Department and other parts of his administration. But the biggest impact was on the judiciary. Trump delegated the task of selecting federal judges to McGahn, who — working closely with Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader — placed well over 100 conservatives on the federal courts, including several who had recently worked at Jones Day. Even after rejoining Jones Day in 2019, McGahn continued to advise Senate Republicans on judicial strategy.It is not uncommon for partners at corporate law firms to dabble in politics. Nor is it rare for a firm itself to throw its weight behind causes on the left or the right. One of the country’s richest firms, Paul, Weiss, for example, has long staked out liberal stances on the public issues of the day (even as it rakes in fees from companies that undercut those ideals). What sets Jones Day apart is the degree to which it penetrated the federal government under Trump and is now taking advantage of a judicial revolution that it helped set in motion.The power of that revolution, which is spreading to courtrooms and statehouses around the country, is now on vivid display. Even with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the Supreme Court has been on a rightward tear. In its most recent term, Trump’s three appointees — the first two handpicked by McGahn and the third, Barrett, plucked by him out of academia for the federal bench — helped erase the constitutional right to abortion, erode the separation of church and state, undermine states’ power to control guns and constrain the authority of federal regulators. Jones Day had a hand in some of those cases, and the firm has telegraphed that it is eyeing additional legal challenges in line with its leaders’ ideology.Jones Day’s influence seems poised to grow. This year, it has been collecting fees from a remarkable assortment of prominent Republican players: a Trump political-action committee; moderates like Senator Susan Collins; Trump allies like Dr. Mehmet Oz; hard-liners like Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — not to mention an assortment of super PACs supporting fringe candidates like Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. star who is running for a Senate seat in Georgia. Francisco recently represented former Attorney General Bill Barr before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. McGahn recently began representing Senator Lindsey Graham as he fights a grand jury subpoena to testify about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The chief of staff to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is a recent Jones Day alum. The next Republican presidential administration — whether it belongs to Trump, DeSantis or someone else — will most likely be stocked with Jones Day lawyers.Founded in Cleveland in 1893, Jones Day was at the vanguard of an era of breakneck expansion in the legal industry. In the 1970s and ’80s, it was one of the first law firms to open multiple offices in the United States and then overseas. It was a tireless, and extremely successful, defender of some of America’s worst corporate actors. The firm helped R.J. Reynolds sow doubts about the dangers of cigarettes. It helped Charles Keating’s fraud-infested savings-and-loan association fend off regulators. It helped Purdue Pharma protect its patents for OxyContin. But it didn’t become a conservative machine until Stephen Brogan took over as managing partner in 2003.Brogan, the son of a New York City police officer, joined Jones Day straight out of the University of Notre Dame’s law school in 1977 and, aside from a two-year stint in the Reagan Justice Department, has worked there ever since. A number of Brogan’s allies said the key to understanding him and his politics was through his faith. “Brogan is extremely conservative, hard-core Catholic, and that is the bedrock of who he is,” one of his Jones Day confidants told me. Brogan brought on a series of high-profile devotees of the Federalist Society — including leading Reagan and Bush administration lawyers like Michael Carvin and Noel Francisco — to work in the firm’s issues-and-appeals practice, which became a sort of in-house conservative think tank. Even as most of the firm’s lawyers remained focused on bread-and-butter work for big companies, Jones Day took on a growing list of ideologically charged cases and causes, including efforts by the ultraconservative Buckeye Institute to prevent the expansion of early voting in Ohio and challenge the legitimacy of the Obama administration’s newly inaugurated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. By 2014, when a trio of Republican lawyers at Patton Boggs, a Washington law firm that was in financial trouble, began looking for a new home, Jones Day was a natural fit. It was huge, it had a thriving Washington office and its leaders were conservative. Plus, the Patton Boggs crew — McGahn, Ben Ginsberg and William McGinley — would fill a void. While Jones Day had built up a formidable practice advising companies on how to navigate the federal bureaucracy, the firm didn’t have a practice advising politicians on how to navigate election and campaign-finance laws. And without the relationships that came from helping people win office, it was harder for Jones Day to wield influence on Capitol Hill and in the White House. It helped that Ginsberg, who had been the top lawyer on presidential campaigns by George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, had known Francisco and Carvin for years. During the interview process, Ginsberg told Francisco that he recognized that Jones Day, despite its conservative reputation, probably employed a lot of Democrats. Would it be a problem to bring in a team that would represent polarizing Republicans? It would not, Francisco assured him. Indeed, promoting conservative principles was becoming part of the firm’s marketing pitch. “The government’s tentacles invade virtually every aspect of what our clients do,” Francisco said in a Jones Day promotional video in 2015. “The job of a lawyer and the job of courts is to ensure that the federal government lives within the limits that our Constitution sets, and I love making sure that those lines are enforced.” Ginsberg and McGahn were well known throughout the Republican establishment, and several would-be presidents soon came to them seeking counsel; Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Perry of Texas and Chris Christie of New Jersey would become clients. McGahn — who had recently served on the Federal Election Commission, watering down campaign-finance rules and slowing the agency’s decision-making in what he said was an effort to make it more responsive to the people and groups it regulated — also represented a who’s who of other G.O.P. power players: the Republican National Committee, the National Rifle Association, the billionaire Koch brothers.There was at least one other key client: Citizens United. The group, famous for its successful Supreme Court challenge of campaign spending restrictions, was run by Dave Bossie, an influential right-wing activist. One day in late 2014, Bossie and McGahn were on the phone, batting around ideas about which presidential campaigns the Jones Day lawyers should work for.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6The Trump InvestigationsNumerous inquiries. More

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    An Unusual $1.6 Billion Donation Bolsters Conservatives

    WASHINGTON — A new conservative nonprofit group scored a $1.6 billion windfall last year via a little-known donor — an extraordinary sum that could give Republicans and their causes a huge financial boost ahead of the midterms, and for years to come.The source of the money was Barre Seid, an electronics manufacturing mogul, and the donation is among the largest — if not the largest — single contributions ever made to a politically focused nonprofit. The beneficiary is a new political group controlled by Leonard A. Leo, an activist who has used his connections to Republican donors and politicians to help engineer the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court and to finance battles over abortion rights, voting rules and climate change policy.This windfall will help cement Mr. Leo’s status as a kingmaker in conservative big money politics. It could also give conservatives an advantage in a type of difficult-to-trace spending that shapes elections and political fights.The cash infusion was arranged through an unusual series of transactions that appear to have avoided tax liabilities. It originated with Mr. Seid, a longtime conservative donor who made a fortune as the chairman and chief executive of an electrical device manufacturing company in Chicago now known as Tripp Lite.Rather than merely giving cash, Mr. Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of Tripp Lite to Mr. Leo’s nonprofit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate for $1.65 billion, according to tax records provided to The New York Times, corporate filings and a person with knowledge of the matter.The nonprofit, called the Marble Freedom Trust, then received all of the proceeds from the sale, in a transaction that appears to have been structured to allow the nonprofit group and Mr. Seid to avoid paying taxes on the proceeds.For perspective, the $1.6 billion that the Marble trust reaped from the sale is slightly more than the total of $1.5 billion spent in 2020 by 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with Democrats, according to an analysis by The Times. That spending, which Democrats embraced to aid the campaigns of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his allies in Congress, dwarfed the roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the Republican Party.The Marble Freedom Trust could help conservatives level the playing field — if not surpass the left — in such nonprofit spending, which is commonly referred to as dark money because the groups involved can raise and spend unlimited sums on politics while revealing little about where they got the money or how they spent it.In a statement, Mr. Leo cited some of the left’s biggest donors and an advisory firm that helps manage the nonprofit groups they fund.“It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals,” Mr. Leo said. Mr. Seid and an associate did not respond to messages seeking comment.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsChallenging DeSantis: Florida Democrats would love to defeat Gov. Ron DeSantis in November. But first they must nominate a candidate who can win in a state where they seem to perpetually fall short.Uniting Around Mastriano: Doug Mastriano, the far-right G.O.P. nominee for Pennsylvania governor, has managed to win over party officials who feared he would squander a winnable race.O’Rourke’s Widening Campaign: Locked in an unexpectedly close race against Gov. Greg Abbott, Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate, has ventured into deeply conservative corners of rural Texas in search of votes.The ‘Impeachment 10’: After Liz Cheney’s primary defeat in Wyoming, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.The Marble Freedom Trust’s formation in May 2020, the donation of Tripp Lite shares by Mr. Seid, and Mr. Leo’s role have not been previously reported.The funds are difficult to trace through public records. Tripp Lite is a private company that is not subject to corporate disclosure rules for public companies. On its tax filing, Marble indicated that the $1.6 billion came from the “sale of gifted company and subsidiaries,” but indicated that it withheld identifying information “to protect donor confidentiality.”And Eaton, the publicly traded Irish company that bought Tripp Lite, does not refer to Marble in statements related to the sale.The person with knowledge of the matter said that the Tripp Lite shares were donated to Marble months before the deal with Eaton was announced in January 2021. The sale was completed in March 2021.Katy Brasser, a spokeswoman for Eaton, said in a statement, “We have no additional information to share regarding the acquisition that was announced last year.”Ray D. Madoff, a professor of tax law at Boston College who is the director of the school’s Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good, said the structure of the transaction was most likely legal but did appear to allow a donor to avoid federal tax obligations from the sale of the company.Here is how it works: Marble Freedom Trust is registered under a section of the tax code — 501(c)4 — for organizations that focus primarily on what the Internal Revenue Service calls “social welfare” and as a result are exempt from paying taxes. Such groups are allowed to engage in political advocacy, but their supporters are not entitled to deduct donations from their income taxes. Supporters can, however, donate assets that a nonprofit can sell and avoid capital gains taxes on the sale. More

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    A Stanford Student Mocked the Federalist Society. It Jeopardized His Graduation.

    The Stanford student sent a satirical flier that drew a complaint from the conservative group. The university then placed a hold on his diploma.It was the final day of classes at Stanford Law School, May 27, when Nicholas Wallace said he was blindsided by a message from one of the deans informing him that his graduation was in jeopardy for potential misconduct.His offense: sending an email flier to fellow law students in January that he pretended was from the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative and libertarian group with a chapter at the law school.The satirical flier promoted a discussion about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, featuring Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The title of the mock event: “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”The chapter’s leaders were not amused. They filed a complaint on March 27 with the university, which said in a message to Mr. Wallace that it wasn’t until May 22 that the complainants had asked the administration to pursue the matter.“I was astounded,” Mr. Wallace, 32, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe that without any more than this letter of concern they placed my graduation and everything I’ve worked for for the last three years, they’ve placed that under threat.”Mr. Wallace’s predicament drew national attention from both free speech groups and conservatives. It served as another example of the intense debate over political speech on college campuses in America.In response to questions on Wednesday, a spokesman for Stanford University said in an email that Mr. Wallace would be allowed to graduate after all after administrators consulted with the university’s legal counsel, who concluded the matter involved issues of protected speech.“In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent,” said the spokesman, E.J. Miranda. “The complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible, and the respondent and complainant have been informed that case law supports that the email is protected speech.”Mr. Miranda said that the university would also review its procedures for placing holds on student diplomas in judicial cases close to graduation.The president of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday night.Mr. Hawley, who received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, was widely criticized for objecting to the certification of the presidential election results. Mr. Paxton has drawn scrutiny for his appearance at a rally in support of Donald J. Trump in Washington on the day of the siege.Representatives for Mr. Hawley and Mr. Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday night.Grabbing attention itself was Mr. Wallace’s satirical flier, which he said he had emailed to a Listserv forum for law school students on Jan. 25, nearly three weeks after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.The flier said that the event was being presented by the Federalist Society on Jan. 6.“Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,” the flier said, offering Grubhub coupons to the first 30 students who R.S.V.P.’d for the fictitious program. “Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”Two days after the satirical flier was sent by Mr. Wallace, it was the focus of a fact check article by USA Today, which reported that the email was a form of satire.In a complaint to the university, unidentified officers of the Federalist Society chapter said that Mr. Wallace’s email had caused significant harm and had led other organizations to cancel their events with the group.“Wallace defamed the student group, its officers, Senator Josh Hawley, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,” the complaint said. “Wallace, impersonating the Stanford Federalist Society, wrote on the flyer that ‘Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,’ insinuating that the student group was encouraging and hosting a riot. He also wrote that Attorney General Paxton advocates for ‘overturn[ing] the results of a free and fair election’ by ‘calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol.’ And he wrote that Senator Hawley believes that violent insurrections are justified.”The names of the complainants were redacted from the complaint, which was posted online on Monday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group working to defend free speech on college campuses. Mr. Wallace had sought the group’s help.“By instituting an investigation and placing a hold on Wallace’s degree days before his graduation, Stanford betrays its legal and moral commitments to respect its students’ expressive rights,” the group said in a letter on Tuesday to one of the law school’s deans.The flap drew the notice of Slate magazine. The writer of that article, Mark Joseph Stern, was the featured speaker in a conversation about the Federalist Society that Mr. Wallace said he had organized about a month after he sent the satirical email.Mr. Wallace’s cause was also taken up by Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University.“Mocking an ideologically-based group can’t be made a basis for denying academic privileges in any open society worthy of respect,” Mr. Tribe wrote on Twitter. “If accurate, this report shows Stanford Law School to be unworthy of treatment as an academic institution.”George T. Conway III, one of the founders of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, also rallied behind Mr. Wallace.“As someone who been involved with the Federalist Society for over 35 years, I agree that this is totally ridiculous,” Mr. Conway said on Twitter, responding to Mr. Tribe.Mr. Wallace, who is from Ann Arbor, Mich., and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, said that he is supposed to take the bar exam this summer in his home state and then start a job with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C.He said that he would not have been able to take the bar exam without his law school diploma, which he will receive on June 12. More

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    Josh Hawley Is ‘Not Going Anywhere.’ How Did He Get Here?

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutTracking the ArrestsVisual TimelineInside the SiegeThe Lost HoursThe Oath KeepersJosh Hawley of Missouri was the first senator to announce he would object to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJosh Hawley Is ‘Not Going Anywhere.’ How Did He Get Here?The senator’s objection to the election results surprised some supporters. But interviews with dozens of people close to him show his growing comfort with doing what it takes to hold on to power.Josh Hawley of Missouri was the first senator to announce he would object to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyElaina Plott and March 7, 2021Updated 9:13 p.m. ETMost Republicans who spoke at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., avoided acknowledging the events of Jan. 6. But less than 30 seconds into his speech, Senator Josh Hawley confronted them head on.That day, Mr. Hawley said, had underscored the “great crisis moment” in which Americans currently found themselves. That day, he explained, the mob had come for him.The “woke mob,” that is. In the weeks since, they had “tried to cancel me, censor me, expel me, shut me down.” To “stop me,” Mr. Hawley said, “from representing you.”“And guess what?” he went on, his tempo building, the audience applauding: “I’m here today, I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not backing down.”The appeal from Missouri’s junior senator reflected what has become standard fare in a Republican Party still in thrall to Donald J. Trump. As Mr. Hawley’s audience seemed to agree, his amplification of the former president’s false claims of a stolen election was not incitement for the mob of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6; it was a principled stand against the “radical left.”Yet to some of the senator’s earliest supporters, it was precisely for its ordinariness that the speech stood out, the latest reminder of the distance between the Josh Hawley they thought they had voted for and the Josh Hawley who now appeared regularly on Fox News.Against the backdrop of Mr. Trump’s G.O.P., the idea had been that Mr. Hawley was different. Sworn in at 39 years old, he ascended to the Senate in part by selling himself as an intellectual in a movement that increasingly seemed to shun intellect. Whereas Mr. Trump fired off brash tweets littered with random capitalizations and adverbs like “bigly,” Mr. Hawley published essays on subjects like medieval theology.Throughout his life, whether as a student at Stanford or a law professor in Missouri, Mr. Hawley had impressed people as “thoughtful” and “sophisticated,” a person of “depth.” And as a growing number of conservatives saw it, he also had the proper ideas. From the time he was a teenager, he had criticized the free-market allegiance at the center of Republican orthodoxy; when he arrived in Washington, he immediately launched into a crusade against Big Tech. The conservative think-tank class embraced him as someone who had the right vocabulary, the right suits and the right worldview to translate Mr. Trump’s vague populist instincts into a fresh blueprint for his party’s future — someone elite enough, in other words, to be entrusted with the banner of anti-elitism.Which is in part why, when Mr. Hawley became the first senator to announce that he would object to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president, many of his allies underwent a public mourning of sorts. They’d expected as much from, say, Ted Cruz — as one senior Senate aide put it, the Texas Republican, who had filibustered Obamacare while its namesake was still in office, had always been transparent about his motivations. But Mr. Hawley?To survey Mr. Hawley’s life is indeed to see a consistency in the broad strokes of his political cosmology. Yet interviews with more than 50 people close to Mr. Hawley cast light on what, in the haze of charm and first impressions, his admirers often seemed to miss: an attachment to the steady cadence of ascension, and a growing comfort with doing what might be necessary to maintain it.Mr. Hawley’s Stanford adviser, the historian David Kennedy, struggled to reconcile his memories with the now-infamous image of the senator, fist raised in solidarity with pro-Trump demonstrators shortly before they descended on the Capitol. “The Josh I knew was not an angry young person,” he recalled. “But when I see him now on television, he just always seems angry — really angry.”Dr. Kennedy acknowledged that Mr. Hawley was just one of many Republicans in the Trump era who had steeped their brand in “anger and resentment and grievance.” But for many of those once close to Mr. Hawley, that was the point: How did a man who seemed so special turn out to be just like everyone else?And what, they wondered, did Josh Hawley have to be so angry about?Mr. Hawley, then Missouri’s attorney general and a candidate for the Senate, at a rally with the president in 2018.Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York TimesAn un-misspent youthIn the late 1990s, the Jesuit high school Mr. Hawley attended in Kansas City, Mo., turned to him for damage control.“There was a group of seniors in our class who had a party that got out of hand, and it became a news story,” recalled Ben Capoccia, a classmate. “They had Josh and I go on the news to make it look like we were not all these bad kids.” He added, “I know what he said was much more eloquent than what I said.”Mr. Hawley was an academic star, champion debater and National Merit finalist who won Rockhurst High’s Kloster award, given to “a young man who consistently puts the welfare of his fellow students above his own interests.”A 1998 high school yearbook photo of Mr. Hawley at an awards ceremony.Credit…Rockhurst High SchoolBut in recent weeks, some of Mr. Hawley’s old classmates and teachers have been aghast at his role in undermining confidence in America’s elections.“I’ve been very disappointed to see who he has become,” said Kristen Ruehter-Thompson, a close friend growing up who was once Mr. Hawley’s prom date.Even his middle school principal, Barbara Weibling, has weighed in. “I’m not surprised he’s a politician and that he’s shooting for the presidency,” said Ms. Weibling, a vocal supporter of Democrats. “The only thing is, I think he had a strict moral upbringing, and I was really disappointed he would suck the country into the lies that Trump told about the election. I just think that’s wrong.”There was never any question that Mr. Hawley was going places. Born on the last day of the 1970s, he was raised with an eye toward the future and a destiny aimed beyond Lexington, a small town about an hour east of Kansas City, where a Civil War cannonball remains embedded in a column at the courthouse. His views and trajectory were shaped by his parents, Ron and Virginia, who met at Fort Hays State University in Kansas. She was Kansas Junior Miss in 1973 and graduated summa cum laude, majoring in English. Ron was a football player who worked as a probation officer after college, before becoming a prosperous banker.Theirs was a traditional, patriarchal and churchgoing household. After pursuing a career as a teacher, Mrs. Hawley “became a speaker and leader of Christian spiritual renewal conferences and retreats in Missouri, Kansas and Arkansas,” according to an account in a Kansas paper. She also ran prayer groups at the family’s Methodist church.Ms. Ruehter-Thompson said Mr. Hawley’s “dad was more of the influence,” adding, “There were always discussions of Rush Limbaugh.”From early on, Mr. Hawley harbored a deep fascination with politics. At 12, he wrote about the 1992 presidential election for his school paper, breaking down how many moderators there would be at the debates; three years later, in writings recently unearthed by The Kansas City Star, he expressed sympathy for militia movements in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. (“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” he wrote.)Later in middle school, he dragged friends to movies like “Nixon.” He also signed their eighth grade yearbooks with variations of “Josh Hawley 2024,” according to Ms. Ruehter-Thompson and another classmate, Andrea Randle, as well as Tim Crosson, the vocal music teacher at the school. (“Sounds like revisionist history,” a Hawley spokeswoman said. “How about they produce a hard copy.”)Mr. Crosson said he and Mr. Hawley would spar about politics. “He would come into my room and announce the number of days left in Bill Clinton’s term, and I would fire back, ‘Four more years,’” Mr. Crosson recalled.Ms. Randle, a Black classmate, was frustrated that Mr. Hawley didn’t do enough to respond to the police killing of George Floyd last May. After initially expressing sympathy, he later accused an alliance of Democrats and the “woke mob” of dividing the country.“We played around after school, and I remember him pulling my hair after history class, that’s what I remember, so it’s so bizarre,” she said. “Me and my friends have talked about it, even over Christmas. Was he always like this and we didn’t know?”At Rockhurst, an all-boys school, a populist ideology began to evolve that didn’t align neatly with either political party. Mr. Hawley seemed most disturbed by the veneration of individual liberty and pluralism in American society. In a “Young Voices” column for The Springfield News-Leader, he called the “rights of the individual vs. the rights of the community” a “fierce debate that so dominates our age.” “The philosophy of radical individualism,” he wrote, was both “cause and symptom of the continuing decline of America’s shared civic life.”The world according to HawleyCollege is often one’s first exposure to knotty questions of identity, politics and faith, but Mr. Hawley moved through Stanford University with unusual conviction. Writing for The News-Leader the summer after his freshman year, in 1999, he invoked a recent speech by his school’s provost, Condoleezza Rice, to argue for a “fresh discussion of first principles and a fundamental rethinking of the role of government and the aims of freedom.” He was 19.At Stanford, Mr. Hawley wrote for the conservative student newspaper as an undergraduate.Credit…Preston Gannaway for The New York TimesOn campus, Mr. Hawley wrote columns for the conservative Stanford Review and was active in student ministry groups. He described his worldview in gauzy phrases like “a proper sense of shared citizenship,” but drew a clearer line on at least one issue. Above his bed he hung a sepia-toned poster of a shirtless male model cradling a newborn; when asked by classmates, he said it reflected his fervent stance against abortion. (The Hawley spokeswoman said the poster is “not something he remembers. But he’s proudly pro-life.”)Political aspirations seemed likely. Classmates recall his careful attention to his image, how he wouldn’t sit for a photo until a stray red Solo cup had been disposed of. Still, he was not viewed as a firebrand; he seemed more animated by the pursuit of an intellectual identity than a partisan affiliation. His first principles were guided by his Christianity.Mr. Hawley sharpened his thinking in conversations with his adviser, Dr. Kennedy. Americans, Mr. Hawley argued, were suffering a crisis of “loneliness,” prisoners of a culture of individualism unmoored from any shared sense of purpose. Hastening this plight, in his view, was the American right’s devotion to the free market.Dr. Kennedy was somewhat surprised to learn years later that his advisee was evangelical; for him, Mr. Hawley’s ideological instincts had called to mind “Rerum Novarum,” the encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 condemning unfettered capitalism and endorsing measures like trade unionism as means of reinforcing the dignity of the working class.“I do think there was something reflexively present in Josh from early on that was aligned with that kind of thinking,” Dr. Kennedy said.After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 2002 and spending a year as a teaching intern at an all-boys school in London, Mr. Hawley went on to Yale Law School. He seemed torn between politics or a life in the ivory tower he would ultimately spend so much time castigating. Both Dr. Kennedy and a Yale classmate remember him on the “knife’s edge,” as the former put it, of pursuing a doctorate in history.In other words, his first imperative was not — did not appear to be — power.“My impression of Josh back then was he was kind of what we need in our democracy,” recalled Ian Bassin, a Yale classmate turned harsh critic. “I always found him to be curious to hear why I came to conclusions I did, and vice versa. And I always felt what brought him to his conclusions were very honest, very genuine, very principled views.”Several classmates, however, observed a change in Mr. Hawley toward the end of his time at Yale. On a campus where success is often measured in Supreme Court clerkships, ambition is a given. But it was nonetheless striking when Mr. Hawley suddenly seemed more interested in winning prestigious posts than in doing the work once he won them.A former classmate recalled Mr. Hawley’s excitement when both were named editors at the Yale Law Journal. Eventually, however, their friendship frayed. Mr. Hawley was very engaged, this person said, when his role meant collecting the business cards of Federalist Society members as he asked them to contribute articles. But when it came to finalizing footnotes the night before deadline, fellow editors often found that he forgot to check his email.Irina Manta recalls a similar experience. She and Mr. Hawley were rivals at the campus Federalist Society chapter and served together as vice presidents of events. “I tried really hard to work with him,” Ms. Manta said. But as the year went on, she found herself organizing events and debates alone. “When I would send emails, I just wouldn’t hear back from him,” she said. “He wasn’t exactly into working hard if he could help it.” (Ms. Manta wrote an article about her time at Yale with Mr. Hawley for USA Today on Jan. 5.)In joining the Federalist Society, Mr. Hawley had moved into the orbit of an ascendant legal community that, for a conservative on campus, offered the clearest avenue to power. Eventually he defeated Ms. Manta for the Yale chapter’s presidency, a title he embraced proudly. (The Hawley spokeswoman said that Ms. Manta was “bitter” about losing the election, and that Mr. Hawley had an “outstanding record in law school” that “speaks for itself.”)The members he was looking to impress were not necessarily his own chapter’s. In August 2005, when John Roberts was asked during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings about his ties to the Federalist Society, Mr. Hawley had his back. In an op-ed in The Hartford Courant, he chided Democrats for attempting to portray the group as a “secret society of scary people.” “Far from subverting the country’s legal order,” he argued, “Federalists seek to strengthen it.”In 2007, a year after finishing law school, Mr. Hawley moved to Washington to clerk for Chief Justice Roberts.One of his fellow clerks was Erin Morrow. She had been just one year ahead of Mr. Hawley at Yale, but it wasn’t until the two shared an office that they became close.Mr. Hawley would later occasionally adopt the folksy affect of a farm child, but Ms. Morrow was the real thing. She had grown up on a cattle farm in New Mexico and, as a student at Texas A&M, had been a member of the All-American Livestock Judging Team. (One of her professors would recall her as among his most impressive students “in her understanding of what is really important in beef-cattle breeding.”) Yale classmates remembered her as brilliant and unpretentious. She and Mr. Hawley wed in 2010.When Thomas Lambert, who was on the appointments committee at the University of Missouri School of Law, learned that the Hawleys were open to moving to Columbia, he jumped at the chance to hire them. “It’s really quite a feather in your cap to hire law clerks from the Supreme Court,” he said. “And here was an opportunity to get two.” The couple began teaching in the fall of 2011.Much of their first years in Missouri centered on their faith. They led a Bible study at an Evangelical Presbyterian church and mentored Christian law students. Mr. Hawley wrote about faith and politics, arguing in a 2015 Notre Dame Law Review essay for a “return to political theology.” Contending that religion had been “quarantined” and “roped off” from politics and law, he railed against the postwar liberal order and called for putting “the state’s sovereignty in its proper and subordinate place.”Not long after returning to Missouri, Mr. Hawley had begun asking Republican consultants to coffee. One of them suggested a state legislative bid. The consultant recalled Mr. Hawley laughing. He wanted to run for attorney general.In Missouri, 30 counties account for most of the primary vote. The consultant advised Mr. Hawley to contact the local Republican Party chairs and ask to speak at their events. He had a winning pitch. In 2014, he helped represent Hobby Lobby in its successful Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. Conservatives enjoyed hearing him talk about the case.The consultant recalled Mr. Hawley contacting him after traversing the state. “OK,” he asked, “now what?”Becoming a politicianAs successful as these tours were, Mr. Hawley’s growing coterie of advisers realized quickly that their candidate disdained, as one termed it, the “people part” of campaigning — the unannounced visits to local diners, the niche roundtable conversations with voters.Yet when it came to selling himself to kingmakers, he thrived.In a campaign season that coincided with Mr. Trump’s political ascent, Mr. Hawley found an eager audience among Missouri’s donor class and Republican elders. He dazzled them by seeming to be everything Mr. Trump was not: tempered, thoughtful, a reservoir of adjectives like “Burkean.” When asked about their first meetings with Mr. Hawley, powerful people in Missouri recalled being enchanted not so much by his vision for office, but by the fact that he sounded smart.A 2018 campaign stop at G.O.P. headquarters in Jefferson City.Credit…Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times“He can get up and talk about issues and look you straight in the eye the whole time,” said Daniel Mehan, president of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce. He added, “He impresses you as someone who knows what he’s talking about.”Among Mr. Hawley’s first — and most important — enthusiasts was John Danforth, the former senator and elder statesman of Missouri Republicans. His blessing was crucial for an ambitious young man looking to scale the state’s political ranks.The two had met years before, when Mr. Danforth visited Yale for a dinner. They stayed in touch. “He referred me to a couple of books: One was by a British politician and political philosopher named Danny Kruger, and the other by Yuval Levin,” Mr. Danforth recalled. “And I thought, well, this is interesting.” He saw in Mr. Hawley “a real intellectual,” a conservative version of his old friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan.Yet when asked, Mr. Danforth couldn’t recall what it was he thought Mr. Hawley wanted to accomplish, as attorney general or as a senator. “I don’t know that I had an impression of that,” he said after a pause.Mr. Danforth helped Mr. Hawley gain the support of the state’s major Republican contributors. Chief among them was David Humphreys, Mr. Hawley’s largest donor, who has given millions of dollars to his campaigns and political action committee.People close to Mr. Hawley recalled his skill in convincing donors that he saw the world as they did; as one early booster put it, it was as if he held up a mirror as he spoke to them. His rejection of Republican economic orthodoxy was well documented, but he convinced libertarian-minded conservatives like Mr. Humphreys and David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, of his devotion to the free market.The most memorable commercial of the campaign featured the candidate surrounded by ladders being climbed by men in suits. In the ad, he castigated “career politicians just climbing the ladder, using one office to get another.” Yet shortly after he was sworn in as attorney general in January 2017, Republicans including Mr. Danforth and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, began urging him to challenge Missouri’s vulnerable Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill. Mr. Hawley obliged.His actual job appeared to take a back seat.“I don’t think he had much interest in that office, really,” said J. Andrew Hirth, who served as deputy general counsel under Mr. Hawley’s predecessor, Chris Koster, a Democrat. “From the moment he got there, he was looking toward the Senate.”He was increasingly absent from the office. Sometimes he was meeting with potential backers for his Senate campaign; one local paper reported that he was leaving work midday to exercise at a gym about a half-hour away. A photograph of a casually clothed Mr. Hawley buying wine on a workday afternoon circulated on social media.The attorney general’s office was quickly hollowed out of talent as Mr. Hawley appointed key officials with stronger religious than managerial credentials. The most notable was Michael Quinlan, who was a “mediator and conflict coach” at a Christian marriage counseling group when he was recruited to oversee civil litigation.He was hired despite having been frequently quoted defending a local bishop who was found guilty of a misdemeanor after shielding a priest who took pornographic pictures of girls. Mr. Hawley’s aides said they hadn’t been aware of those comments. Mr. Quinlan later departed after a female employee complained about receiving an unwelcome lecture from him about her sex life; he denied accusations of acting improperly.Experienced lawyers who defended state agencies against lawsuits headed for the exits. Only one litigator who had worked under Mr. Hawley’s predecessor stayed on in the main office, in Jefferson City. As morale continued to sag, eight of Mr. Hawley’s own hires quit too.Amid the turmoil, outside public relations consultants took an unusually prominent role. In 2017, before a raid on massage parlors in Springfield, the consultants told the attorney general’s staff that they were angling for an appearance with the CNN anchor Jake Tapper. They instructed aides that Mr. Hawley, “should be wearing some kind of law enforcement garb — like a police jacket and hat,” according to internal emails.During the raids, Mr. Hawley gathered reporters in a strip-mall parking lot, his expression grim and a large badge hanging around his neck.“Josh was the chief law enforcement officer of the state,” the Hawley spokeswoman said. “He wore a badge.”A ‘champion in the Senate’When Mr. Hawley arrived in Washington in January 2019 as Missouri’s junior senator, he positioned himself as the intellectual heir of Trumpism — the politician who could integrate the president’s populist instincts into a comprehensive ideology for the G.O.P. In his maiden speech, he summoned the lamentation of cultural erosion he’d been refining since high school, arguing that the “great American middle” had been overlooked by a “new, arrogant aristocracy.”Mr. Hawley was sworn in as a senator in January 2019, at age 39.Credit…Sarah Silbiger/The New York TimesFor conservatives who felt Mr. Trump had identified uncomfortable truths about the party despite ultimately governing like a typical Republican, Mr. Hawley’s arrival was timely. That July, conservative writers and policy experts gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington for the inaugural National Conservatism Conference, meant to map a departure from the corporate-class policies that for decades had defined conservatism. Mr. Hawley, who in his keynote speech decried the “cosmopolitan consensus,” was introduced as the fledgling movement’s “champion in the Senate.”He did not discourage whispers about 2024, and some younger Trump campaign aides, who saw him as the “refined” version of their boss, mused privately about working for him should he run. It wasn’t long before Donald Trump Jr. was inviting him to lunch at his father’s Washington hotel.Even so, he baffled his party’s leadership as he tried to derail the confirmation of some of Mr. Trump’s conservative judicial nominees, deeming their records on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage insufficiently pure.But it was Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the election results that offered the first real stress test for the brand Mr. Hawley had labored to cultivate — whether it was possible to be both the darling of the conservative intelligentsia and the “fighter” the party’s base craved.He had reason to believe it was. He was comfortable paying “the price of admission,” as one Republican official put it, to a place in Mr. Trump’s G.O.P., in part because nothing in his short political career had suggested there would ever be a cost. Early on, few had blinked when he embraced the president during a visit to Missouri. He had courted far-right figures during his campaign, yet still received plum speaking slots at high-minded conferences.And so on Dec. 30, Josh Hawley became the first Senate Republican to announce his intent to challenge Mr. Biden’s congressional certification.Mr. Hawley’s team was adamant that he had not been motivated by a potential presidential bid in 2024, but among other things had been moved by a December video conference with 30 constituents who said they felt “disenfranchised” by Mr. Biden’s victory.“He knows the state well after two campaigns, and I think he knew that Missourians supported the president,” said James Harris, a longtime political adviser to Mr. Hawley.He tried to thread the needle as he always had, wrapping his objection not in fevered “STOP THE STEAL” tweets but in questions about the constitutionality of mail-in voting in Pennsylvania.And, had there been no violence, perhaps his gambit would have worked. But when Mr. Hawley and others lent their voices to Mr. Trump’s lie of rampant voter fraud, people listened.Mr. Hawley spent much of Jan. 6 hiding with his colleagues in a Senate committee room as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. He sat hunched against the wall, eyes fixed on his phone, as Republicans and Democrats alike blamed him for the madness. Later that evening, when senators safely reconvened to finish certifying the election, Mr. Hawley forged ahead with his objection.The reckoning was swift. Simon & Schuster dropped plans to publish his book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Major donors severed ties. Mr. Danforth called supporting Mr. Hawley “the biggest mistake of my life.” His wife, Erin, was collateral damage: Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm where she had briefly practiced, purged an old biography from its website. She was scheduled to teach a course in constitutional litigation at the University of Missouri, but “after the events of Jan. 6, people were not so happy about that,” said Professor Lambert, who brought the couple to the school; in response, he had stressed that “you cannot hold her responsible for her husband’s views.”Mr. Hawley at the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to confirm the Electoral College results.Credit…Pool photo by Erin SchaffYet something else happened, too. Mr. Hawley saw a surge in small-dollar donations to his campaign, making January his best fund-raising month since 2018. As Axios first reported, the $969,000 he amassed easily offset defections from corporate political action committees. Added to that was the applause of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has since bundled more than $300,000 for Mr. Hawley.Mr. Hawley had a choice. He could commit to his burgeoning fighter persona. “My No. 1 piece of advice was: You can’t go back on this now. You go back on this now, and you make absolutely everyone angry,” recalled his adviser Gregg Keller.Or he could try to reclaim the scholarly identity that had long propelled him. Oren Cass, the founder of American Compass, a think tank that aims to advance a more working-class-friendly conservatism, had frequently praised Mr. Hawley for defying Republican dogma. But he called the senator’s objections to the election “obnoxious” and “self-serving.” He urged him to acknowledge his “failure of judgment.”As his advisers saw it, the lessons of the Trump era — that success in today’s G.O.P. means never having to say you’re sorry — were clear. And Josh Hawley was nothing if not a star student.In the weeks since, Mr. Hawley has vowed to sue the “woke mob” at Simon & Schuster for dropping his book. He’s written for The New York Post about “the muzzling of America.” He has appeared on Fox News to discuss said muzzling. And while he said shortly after the riot that he would not run for president in 2024, his advisers have continued to hype him as “one of the favorites” of a potential Republican primary field, as Mr. Keller put it.Mr. Hawley tested his new cri de coeur on a live audience on Feb. 26, at the gathering of the conservative faithful in Orlando. “You know, on Jan. 6, I objected to the Electoral College certification,” he began. “Maybe you heard about it.”The room erupted. “I did,” he went on, “I stood up —” His words were drowned out by cheers.It had not been the mood of his speech. But as he paused to take in the standing ovation, Mr. Hawley seemed happy.Sheelagh McNeill and More

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