When Chuck Hatfield, a lawyer in Missouri, showed up at a 2019 hearing to represent Planned Parenthood in its fight to keep a license for the state’s lone surgical abortion clinic, he was surprised to see a familiar face opposing him in the state’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer.
It was an administrative hearing, not a high-stakes trial, but Mr. Sauer, Missouri’s top appellate lawyer, had not sent a deputy. Instead, he came to argue himself that Planned Parenthood’s license should not be renewed because of a handful of cases of complications resulting from abortions. Mr. Sauer lost the hearing, but he had come prepared for a fight.
“He litigated the case aggressively,” Mr. Hatfield said.
Mr. Sauer, 50, now President Trump’s selection to be the U.S. solicitor general — the top Justice Department official representing the federal government in arguments before the Supreme Court — first gained national attention last year when he represented Mr. Trump in his presidential immunity case. He presented a bold argument: A former president could be immune from prosecution even if he ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.
That example elicited outcries at the time, but Mr. Hatfield said he found it typical of Mr. Sauer, a particularly assertive litigator for conservative causes for years, most notably abortion.
“Other lawyers would perhaps not take the stretch positions, but John will go ahead and take them,” Mr. Hatfield said.
On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Mr. Sauer, 52 to 45, putting him in charge of Mr. Trump’s aggressive attempt to get the Supreme Court to intervene in a series of cases in which lower court judges have temporarily blocked wide pieces of the administration’s agenda.
Mr. Sauer’s confirmation puts him in a position sometimes referred to as the “10th justice.” It also makes him one of a series of Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers chosen to occupy senior positions in the Justice Department.
Mr. Sauer’s career litigating against same-sex marriage, access to contraception and transgender girls in women’s sports could appear to be an easy fit with the Trump administration. But his past commitment to anti-abortion litigation may prove a high-wire act with a president who has faced a tricky political calculus on abortion, which polling shows a majority of the country believes should be legal.
Despite appointing three justices who helped overturn constitutional protections for abortion and claiming credit for their decision, Mr. Trump tried to soften his abortion position during the 2024 campaign, promising to veto a national ban. In December, he said he would not ask the F.D.A. to block access to abortion pills.
Abortion restrictions are likely to return to the court as anti-abortion groups continue to push to limit access to the procedure. The justices heard two challenges to abortion last term — an attempt to limit access to a widely available abortion pill and a challenge to Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion — and it seems likely that opponents of abortion will continue to bring test cases before the court’s 6-to-3 conservative supermajority.
“Sauer might have to decide how much of a team player he wants to be if the administration isn’t as strident as he’s expressed, though that stridency might be what it wants,” said Lincoln Caplan, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and the author of a book on the history of solicitor generals.
Although the role was originally thought to be independent from politics, in recent decades, the solicitor general has become more closely aligned with the president, Mr. Caplan said. He said he saw Mr. Sauer’s nomination as “a big next step on the spectrum of politically compatible solicitors general.”
Mr. Sauer did not respond to requests for comment.
Abortion rights organizations said they were viewing Mr. Sauer’s nomination with concern, worried that despite Mr. Trump’s mixed messages on abortion, the Justice Department is now led by opponents of abortion rights. That includes Attorney General Pam Bondi, who as Florida’s attorney general supported abortion restrictions and challenged the Affordable Care Act’s provision requiring most health plans to cover birth control.
“Together, they’re in a position to really cause grave and longstanding damage to reproductive rights,” said Freya Riedlin, the senior federal policy counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Unlike other lawyers who have held the job in recent years, Mr. Sauer spent much of his career in his home state of Missouri, rather than at a top Washington firm or in academia.
He grew up in St. Louis in a politically connected, wealthy Catholic family. His father, Fred, a businessman who unsuccessfully ran for governor, founded Missouri Roundtable for Life, an organization focused on opposing abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative anti-abortion activist, was a family friend who praised the younger Mr. Sauer as “a brilliant young lawyer” for his legal writings opposing same-sex marriage.
At Saint Louis Priory School, an all-boys private school run by Benedictine monks. Mr. Sauer had a reputation as a hard-charging student dedicated to conservative values.
“He would not be outworked,” said Tim O’Connell, a former classmate who is now a lawyer in Missouri.
Mr. Sauer went on to earn elite credentials, studying at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and at Harvard Law, where he served as an editor on the law review.
Judge J. Michael Luttig chose Mr. Sauer as one of his law clerks, a prestigious position made more desirable because many of his clerks went on to work at the Supreme Court.
Although Judge Luttig has become an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, particularly of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, he spoke highly of his former clerk.
“He is intellectually honest,” Judge Luttig said of Mr. Sauer. “He is truthful, and he’s a man of great integrity. These are the most important qualities for a solicitor general.”
Mr. Sauer then clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia before joining Cooper & Kirk, an influential conservative Washington law firm, for less than two years before returning to Missouri in 2008 as an assistant federal prosecutor. In 2015, he founded his own firm, the James Otis Law Group, named for an early American lawyer who espoused limited government and opposed British measures that allowed law enforcement officials to search private property.
That year he represented a group of activists from the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress who had been sued after they secretly recorded conferences of the National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood and released videos that purported to show officials trafficking in fetal parts. The National Abortion Federation accused the group of carrying out a conspiracy aimed at harassing abortion providers.
He also represented Catholic theologians in a case before the Supreme Court, arguing that the craft store Hobby Lobby should not be required to pay for insurance to cover contraception.
In 2017, Josh Hawley, who had been newly elected as Missouri’s attorney general, invited him to lunch at a Cracker Barrel. Over chicken fried steak, Mr. Hawley made his pitch.
“I said, ‘John, you have the ability and record to be solicitor general of the United States, but would you consider becoming solicitor general of the state of Missouri?’” Mr. Hawley recalled at Mr. Sauer’s confirmation hearing in February.
Under Mr. Hawley, the office pushed for limits on abortion access, including the 2019 case against Planned Parenthood. That effort gained national attention after the director of the Missouri health department testified that he had created a spreadsheet to track the menstrual cycles of Planned Parenthood patients to try to identify “failed abortions.”
In an emailed statement, Mr. Hawley said Mr. Sauer was his “friend” and would make a “superb” solicitor general.
Mr. Sauer also defended a state law aimed at blocking Medicaid funds from going to Planned Parenthood, part of a larger Republican effort to defund the organization.
During that time, according to information Mr. Sauer provided in the confirmation process, he participated in several trainings for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization. The group has led many of the legal challenges to abortion, including a case last year challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of abortion medication.
The Supreme Court rejected that case, finding that the doctors and anti-abortion medical groups who brought the lawsuit had failed to show they were directly injured. But the justices did not settle the question of whether the pill should remain available.
In 2019, Mr. Sauer traveled to Cancún, Mexico, to an event hosted by the group for senior staff from state attorneys general office. He appeared on a panel called “Reading In Between the Tea Leaves: The Road Ahead for Pro-Life Litigation.”
In the weeks after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the 2022 case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mr. Sauer again spoke at a summit organized by the group, this time on state-level efforts to further restrict abortion.
In January 2023, he returned to private practice, representing Mr. Trump in both his immunity case and in the New York civil case in which Mr. Trump was accused of sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s.
At Mr. Sauer’s confirmation hearing, Democrats focused on his work for Mr. Trump, questioning whether he would put loyalty to the president ahead of the Constitution. In December, Mr. Sauer filed an unusual brief as the personal lawyer for Mr. Trump in a Supreme Court case over whether protecting national security required TikTok to be sold or closed.
The brief, filed after Mr. Trump had announced Mr. Sauer as his choice for solicitor general, argued that the justices should temporarily block a law that required ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app’s operations in the United States or shut it down so that Mr. Trump could address the matter once he took office.
“President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise” to resolve the matter, Mr. Sauer wrote.
The justices rejected those arguments, unanimously upholding the law.
But even as he pushed forward as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Mr. Sauer continued to fight against abortion. Records from Missouri’s ethics commission show he contributed $777,000 to groups opposing a ballot measure aimed at ensuring abortion access in the state. He was among the largest donors to those groups.
Julie Tate contributed research.
