Stephen Miller's Law Firm Has Paid More Than $1,000,000 to Anti-Abortion Lawyer Jonathan Mitchell

Update, 12/20/24: America First Legal Foundation forms for 2023 recently became available and reveal that Miller's organization has paid Mitchell more than $1 million over three years. Amounts have been updated below.

As we await the start of the second Trump administration, I wanted to share some publicly available data for informational purposes.

The data concerns Jonathan Mitchell, an ultraconservative lawyer who co-wrote the Texas bounty hunter abortion ban which the Supreme Court upheld in September 2021, effectively nullifying Roe v. Wade. Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general and Scalia clerk, was nominated for a role in the first Trump administration but couldn't get Senate confirmation because of his anti-union litigation. Still, he has remained in Trump's orbit—most notably arguing on his behalf at the Supreme Court over whether Colorado could remove Trump from the presidential ballot (Trump v. Anderson).

Mitchell is on the bleeding edge of various battles to erase people's rights. He's suing over minors' ability to get birth control without their parents knowing, he's challenging requirements that insurance companies cover PrEP for HIV, and he is the biggest booster of the idea that the U.S. government could ban abortion pills—if not all procedures—by simply enforcing the 19th-century Comstock Act. "We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Mitchell told the New York Times earlier this year.

So it is notable that he also appears to have deep connections to Stephen Miller, who will be White House deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller started a law firm after Trump left office called America First Legal Foundation and AFLF has paid Mitchell a staggering $1,088,063 as a contractor its first three years of operation: $305,062 in 2021 and $414,314 in 2022, and $368,687 in 2023.

Here are relevant parts of the group's IRS forms:

Mitchell has written some amicus briefs with AFLF in cases about affirmative action and gender-affirming care, but this is a huge sum of money. (On legal briefs, Mitchell's name appears alongside AFLF vice president and general counsel Gene Hamilton. Hamilton wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Justice, which calls for the agency to enforce Comstock against providers and distributors of abortion pills.)

A March New York Times story on AFLF's high spending didn't report the amount given to Mitchell:

"To fill in the legal gaps, Mr. Miller has relied heavily on two conservative law firms with considerable experience in high-profile cases: Consovoy McCarthy, based in Arlington, Va., whose nine partners include five who served as clerks to Justice Clarence Thomas; and the Austin-based office of Jonathan Mitchell, who devised the legal mechanism for the Texas legislation that all but banned abortion in the state."

Miller's group paid Consovoy McCarthy $234,357 in 2022, meaning it gave more money to a single lawyer than it paid to a firm with nine partners.

Mitchell is getting money elsewhere, too. Christian nationalist law firm Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has paid Mitchell more than $100,000 between July 2019 and June 2023—and they have embraced his Comstock theory in multiple Supreme Court cases (Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA on abortion pills and, surprisingly, Loper Bright, a case about government agency power).

More IRS form snippets:

Taking a moment here to note that Donors Trust, a dark-money group linked to Federalist Society chair Leonard Leo, gave ADF more than $625,000 in 2022 with the bulk of it ($500,000) earmarked for a "post-Roe v. Wade initiative." Make of that what you will.

Many people are focusing on Stephen Miller's fascistic views on immigration and mass deportation, and rightly so. But don't discount the strong possibility that Miller will have Trump's ear on access to abortion, birth control, and gender-affirming care.

Trump recently told NBC News that he couldn't commit to leaving abortion pill access as it currently stands. “Will I commit, I mean… things change. I think they change,” Trump told Kristen Welker. "I don’t like putting myself in a position like that."

And:

• The Supreme Court heard arguments last week over whether sex discrimination in medical care is legal. The Tennessee law is about gender-affirming care for minors but it has huge implications for all of us. I recapped the hearing for Jezebel and wrote an analysis for Slate about how the playbook is eerily similar to the one attacking abortion.
• I also wrote for MSNBC about conservative led-states trying to bury data on women and pregnant people dying as a result of abortion bans.
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