On July 30, 2025, Senate Republicans voted to confirm T. Elliot Gaiser as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, a position within the Justice Department responsible for providing legal advice to the president and executive agencies. Gaiser’s tenure got off to an appalling start: Soon after Gaiser began leading OLC, the administration began murdering people in the Caribbean Sea, and claiming that Gaiser’s office said it was allowed to do so.
Specifically, on September 2, President Donald Trump ordered the military to bomb a boat full of people who Trump alleged were “engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities.” Then, at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s direction, U.S. armed forces struck the boat four times, killing all 11 people on board and sinking the ship.
The executive branch has no legal authority to unilaterally conduct lethal military strikes on civilians, regardless of whether Trump thinks they could be “affiliated” with drug cartels. But according to investigative reports and court filings, on September 5, the OLC issued a classified memo concluding that the president has vast authority to order military attacks on alleged drug traffickers in international waters—and Hegseth and those who carried out the killings are immune from prosecution for homicide.
Since then, the administration has repeatedly claimed that the extrajudicial executions were lawful, and that it adhered to the OLC memo’s analysis. It has also refused to make the memo public, denying people the opportunity to evaluate the strength of that analysis for themselves. And it has continued its bombing campaign against civilian boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. To date, the Trump administration has relied on the secret memo produced by Gaiser’s office as legal justification to kill at least 243 people.
Last week, motivated in significant part by concern about the state of democracy, voters gave Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. But on November 4—the day after voters elected Texas Democrat James Talarico to the Senate—Gaiser received a phone call from staffers in the office of Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who spoke with Gaiser about a vacant federal district court judgeship in Texas. On Friday, November 6, Gaiser discussed a possible nomination with Texas’s outgoing Republican senator, John Cornyn, and the White House Counsel’s Office.
By Sunday, November 8, Gaiser, a former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, had submitted his federal judicial nominee questionnaire to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Two days later, Trump announced on social media that he was nominating Gaiser to serve as a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas.
Normally, judicial nominees from Texas advance through a Federal Judicial Evaluation Committee that Cruz and Cornyn established in 2013 to assess candidates’ qualifications, conduct interviews, and make recommendations to the senators. Indeed, Cruz and Cornyn encouraged potential nominees to vie for the very seat to which Gaiser has now been nominated by completing an application packet, which they said “must be” submitted to their judicial nominating commission “no later than November 17, 2025.” Gaiser, who was contacted by Cruz’s office a year after that deadline, does not appear to have gone through this process.
Gaiser’s answers to the Senate questionnaire provide some hints as to why he did not apply for the Texas job. He was born and raised in Ohio, and served as the solicitor general of Ohio prior to joining OLC. His only professional connection to Texas is a few months spent volunteering for Cruz’s failed presidential campaign in 2016, immediately followed by a one-year stint as a law clerk in Houston. He is not admitted to the bar in Texas, nor has he been admitted to practice in any of Texas’s federal district courts. And in the ten years since he graduated from law school, he says he has “not personally tried any cases to verdict, judgment, or final decision.”
Republicans are fast-tracking Gaiser’s nomination to a federal district judgeship in Texas, and they are not doing so because he has some wealth of experience litigating in the state. Gaiser’s qualifications come from his experience crafting legal arguments to defend horrors like Trump and Hegseth’s use of the military to carry out hundreds of extrajudicial executions of civilians.
As OLC Assistant Attorney General, for instance, Gaiser laid the groundwork for destruction of evidence by arguing that Trump doesn’t need to comply with the Presidential Records Act. Before that, as Ohio Solicitor General, he led the state’s defense of laws banning abortion and healthcare for transgender youth. Before that, as a Trump campaign lawyer, he developed and pushed the idea that Vice President Mike Pence could legally overturn the presidential election results by refusing to recognize the electors from states where Trump lost. Such experiences warrant any number of professional consequences, certainly, but a promotion isn’t one of them.
Gaiser’s career has been brief, but it has already established ample evidence of his far-right bona fides. If confirmed, fellow ideologues would be able to go to his courtroom and advance their shared agenda for the rest of his life. American voters resoundingly rejected that agenda last week, and made clear that they want to hold Trump, Hegseth, and their enablers accountable for all the harm that they’ve done. Senate Republicans are desperate to quickly confirm judges like Gaiser who they can count on to condone that harm instead.
