by Semafor.com reported yesterday that Sarah Rogers of Brewer, Attorneys and Counselors, has been nominated by President Trump to the the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. This is confirmed by the White House as her name was included in a list of over 50 nominations for various positions that must be confirmed by the Senate.
The nominations include a New York lawyer, Sarah Rogers, who has defended the National Rifle Association on free speech grounds and litigated against content moderation. Her appointment to be the under secretary for public diplomacy — a role that had, in the Biden administration, been involved in efforts to combat false information on social media, signals that the Trump administration is planning to globalize its push to force social platforms to allow a wider range of speech…
Rogers has no obvious foreign policy experience, but brings a similar point of view on key issues around speech and social media platforms. A partner at the New York litigation boutique Brewer, Rogers represented the National Rifle Association alongside the ACLU in a winning appeal to the Supreme Court last March. She also represented the NRA against the New York State Attorney General, who was seeking to dissolve the organization, which the NRA beat back on First Amendment grounds.
I will acknowledge that Rogers was a co-counsel along with Bill Brewer and Noah Peters on NRA v. Vullo. However, and this is an important point, the counsel of record and the heavy lifter in this case at the SCOTUS was First Amendment law expert Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law. Once the ACLU was brought into the case, you had as many as 10 of their attorneys working on the case while Prof. Volokh remained the Counsel of Record.
While Judge Cohen did mention the First Amendment in his ruling taking dissolution off the table in People of NY v NRA et al, it seems to me to be more of an after thought. He only devoted one paragraph to that argument. More important in his 42-page ruling was whether or not the New York Attorney General alleged facts sufficient to meet the standard for judicial dissolution. He found that she did not. He said you could not conflate “the Individual Defendants with the NRA writ large for purposes of dissolution is inappropriate here for the reasons” he discussed earlier. He went on to say it was the members of the NRA who had suffered the most harm and not the general public.
Rogers did participate in most of the hearings in the New York case as the primary litigator for the NRA. I will give her that.
Trump has in the past shown a certain affection for those educated at Ivy League schools. Rogers satisfies that criteria with an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and a law degree from Columbia. The Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy heads the Bureau of Global Public Affairs (PR for the USA) and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (cultivating personal ties with current and future global leaders). Without trying to be snarky, she will be running the fluffier stuff at the State Department.
While Ms. Rogers will be taking a cut in pay, I’m going to say it probably is worth it to get away from Bill Brewer and his shenanigans. Down the road, I’m sure she will be able to parlay her experience as an Under Secretary of State into a prime partnership with a New York or DC law firm.
