Attorney General Jeff Sessions Lawyers Up – Hires Top GOP Civil Litigator Who Defended Prop 8

Chuck Cooper Has Argued Cases in Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage, People With HIV/AIDS, and Interracial Dating

Add Attorney General Jeff Sessions to the list of Trump administration officials who have retained private counsel to protect them, likely through the course of the Russia investigation. Sessions has hired Chuck Cooper, a top civil litigator who defended California’s anti-gay ban on same-sex marriage all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Charles Cooper, the well-known Republican lawyer, wasn’t simply in attendance at U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ congressional hearing one week ago to support his friend. Cooper is Sessions’ personal lawyer, he confirmed in an email Tuesday,” The National Law Journal reports. 

Cooper did not state what role he will play, or if he is advising Sessions in the criminal investigation into the administration’s possible collusion with Russia.

“But a continuing attorney-client relationship between the attorney general and a private lawyer could signal they expect additional perilous legal questions—including from Robert Mueller III’s special counsel investigation,” the Journal adds. 

The choice of Cooper is not surprising. He was named “one of the 10 best civil litigators in Washington,” according to his bio. Both attorneys hail from Alabama. Both have strongly opposed same-sex marriage and LGBT equality. (As he was defending California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Cooper’s daughter told him she is a lesbian, he revealed later. He said he may evolve down the road.)

“In legal filings, Cooper has defended a university that wanted to ban interracial dating on the basis of religious freedom, sided with employers who wanted to fire employees with HIV, and fought for a proposition against gay marriage in California. For starters,” Heavy reported in February.

Cooper was widely believed to be one of Donald Trump’s top choices to become solicitor general, but withdrew from consideration when George T. Conway, a high-profile attorney and husband of White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway, was reportedly under consideration. (Conway later withdrew his name from consideration for another Trump administration post.)

Still curious about Chuck Cooper? In 2013 New Republic published a profile of the Prop 8 attorney. It wasn’t pretty. An excerpt:

Cooper took a controversial stance with regard to discrimination again in 1986, after he had taken over the [DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel], when he argued that the federal government could reject job candidates with AIDS out of fear of contracting the disease. Cooper again claimed to be relying on a strict reading of the law as written – the law prohibited discrimination against people on the basis of a physical handicap, he argued, but it didn’t say anything about a fear of contagion, which as a legal matter, was something else entirely – but the decision ignited a firestorm of controversy, angering health experts who said it propagated the dangerous myth that AIDS could be transmitted through casual contact. Again, as it had with Bob Jones [University], Cooper’s rigidity with respect to the strict meaning of the law trumped his concern for how it might affect people.

“Chuck never knew anyone with AIDS. He couldn’t’ even envision putting himself in the place of knowing someone with AIDS,” explains Doug Kmiec, who led the Office of Legal Counsel after Cooper. Kmiec, who generally saw Cooper as a reasonable person, nonetheless thought his principled stances could be flawed. “I think if there is a human failing in formality, it prevents you from getting close enough to see that the other guys have feelings.”

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Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr and a CC license