Law students, you can (and, maybe increasingly, should) say "no" to (some) judicial clerkships

A generation ago, a typical federal judicial clerkship experience looked like this:

A student would graduate from law school around May and begin a one-year (or sometimes two-year) clerkship in August. The graduate would then enter into legal practice—a firm, the government, or public interest practice—and begin a career in the second or third year out of law school. The graduate might have to move twice (to a clerkship, and then to a job) as opposed to once (to a job). The graduate at 25 years of age might begin the “ordinary” legal career at 26 (or 27). The clerkship was a “learning” opportunity—judges mentored clerks and helped develop their writing in that first year out of law school. (This was a system common in state courts, too.)

The system has radically changed in a generation.

Total placement into federal judicial clerkships among recent graduates has slid roughly 10% in the last decade.

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And that’s despite the fact that the federal judiciary is very well staffed—judicial vacancies peaked around 2018, but they at recent stable lows and consistent with staffing a decade ago.

That means a comparable number of federal judges are hiring fewer recent law school graduates.

So, how are they filling positions? It could be an uptick in career clerks, but that doesn’t appear to be all of it.

A generation ago, virtually all Supreme Court clerks had just one prior clerkship experience. Now, nearly all of them have two, and sometimes three, clerkship experiences. We’re starting to see “stacking” of clerkships as an increasingly common practice. More students than ever are clerking for multiple federal judges. And more are clerking after graduation. Yale Law, for instance, has gone so far as to include an asterisk beside its clerkship statistics to add the number of clerkships for graduates that begin after graduation. For the Class of 2022, that’s 51 among graduates and another 30 after graduation. That was 42 and 43 for the Class of 2021—yes, more graduates had clerkships that began at least one year after graduating than in that initial year.

These two practices appear to be diverging by the type of judge. And here, this is something more anecdotal to report. And this report is overwhelmingly about court of appeals judges, a smaller cohort of all federal judges but who tend to hire three or four clerks each year as opposed to one or two more common for district courts.

Republican-appointed judges, particularly those appointed by President Trump, have had a fairly aggressive hiring plan. They have increasingly relied on interviewing and hiring first-year law students—and sometimes hiring them not for immediately after graduation but for some years out. And they are increasingly interested in “stacking” clerkships, as many of them are young, ambitious, and style themselves “feeders.” Given how many of them have appeared on one of Trump’s many “lists” of potential Supreme Court nominees, it is not a great surprise that they are vying over a small pool of clerks—not just outstanding students, but sufficiently credentialed to be potential Supreme Court clerks. It also reflects some desire to hire clerks who have already been trained elsewhere—in effect, making the job more efficient for the judge, who can spend less time “training” the clerk and more time managing the clerk’s work product.

Democratic-appointed judges, particularly those appointed by President Biden, have stuck more closely to the “plan,” which means that students must have at least two years of grades before being considered. But these judges increasingly prefer work experience—which means, hiring fewer clerks directly out of law school. They are not as aggressively “stacking,” but there are more appellate+district clerks than a generation ago (whereas many Republican judges are moving toward appellate+appellate clerks), although the combinations can of course vary. Like the Republican-appointed judges, hiring clerks with more work experience is more efficient.

This change has shifted a lot of costs.

For one, judges used to play a greater role as mentors training new law school graduates. If law school graduates are starting their careers elsewhere before clerking for a judge, the model has shifted away from that judge-led training and mentorship model. Not entirely, of course—clerks who are only a year or two removed from law school still have much to learn. But there is an expectation that the earliest training may well happen elsewhere. Sometimes that’s other judges. And sometimes that’s law firms. I suppose as long as law firms are willing to accept that role—spending the earliest years training and seeing those associates (who cannot practically be staffed on major long-term matters) leave for a clerkship (or two or three), perhaps to return—then the model will work.

For another, judges often had clerks serve as “ambassadors” for their chambers, and for the bench more generally, as attorneys go practice in the legal profession. If “stacking” is increasingly common, then there are simply fewer such ambassadors out in the world.

And a major cost is on law school graduates. At the beginning, I noted that 25-year-old graduates might move twice after graduating law school and begin their careers at 26. Now, the expectation is increasingly to move three or four times and push of the true beginning of a career path until perhaps 30, depending on how many years the interim jobs take place. And that can of course be later for students who are not 25 but older, who perhaps took a few years off between college and law school.

This is a significant burden for law school graduates. The moving costs are high. The pressure to postpone personal or family decisions given the itinerant nature of serial jobs is significant (a point I’ve raised relatedly in the law school teaching market, too).

The opportunity and financial costs of missing or disrupting years of typical legal service can be high. On the financial front, it used to be a generation ago that starting salaries were $160,000 (excluding bonuses) and a clerkship salary was around $50,000 with an expected bonus of $50,000. That gap has widened significantly. Starting salaries are now $225,000 (excluding bonuses) and a clerkship salary is around $65,000 with an expected bonus of $75,000 (potentially more for multiple clerkships).

But a graduate who clerks for three judges enters as fourth-year associate… essentially has the litigation skills of a first-year associate and a long ramp-up. Yes, a graduate can hit the ground running and ramp up more quickly than a first-year associate. But some skills (including navigating firm culture, and building trust and relationships with clients) cannot be short circuited. A graduate who works at a firm for a year or two, then heads off to clerk for a couple of judges before returning, likewise returns as a fourth- or fifth-year associate with a kind of soft reboot at the firm. And at some firms, non-share partnership arises in the sixth or seventh year, and pressure to perform well in a shorter period of time is high. Client development is trickier if grads are serially clerking or interrupting their practice to clerk.

For first generation law school graduates, these pressures can be particularly acute. They are navigating the legal profession with greater uncertainty, and they have the opportunity to make substantial money in practice, but then face countervailing pressure to give that opportunity up and move, perhaps repeatedly, with increasing uncertainty—and increasing questions about the value proposition.

It would be interesting if NALP or some other researcher could track future longitudinal outcomes of judicial clerks. Does stacking clerkships reduce the likelihood that someone remains in “big law” or makes partner? Or, maybe my intuition is wrong and it has no effect. Does it means people are more likely to head into government or become a judge themselves sometime? What are the longitudinal effects that we can expect?

But law students do need to ask hard questions. The first is, what’s the value of the clerkship? It is valuable, to be sure. It is the experience, the credential, seeing what goes on inside a judicial chambers. But students might want to ask hard questions about the value add of a second or third clerkship. Does the varied experience of district v. appellate or state v. federal offer enough potential value, or is the incremental benefit much smaller after having worked in a judicial chambers? Is being connected to two sets of judicial clerk alumni in their network of sufficient value? What are the lifestyle costs for family or personal life if these one-year serial positions in different cities stack up? If I want to clerk for the Supreme Court, what are my true odds in getting there with a third as opposed to just two clerkships, or a second as opposed to just one? What opportunity costs am I losing at my law firm, and am I willing to give that up?

Career development offices have every incentive to place students into clerkships. Students have great desire to obtain clerkships. Judges want the most capable and qualified candidates.

But we may be at a breaking point for the current system. Students should be asking hard questions, the kind of questions that didn’t need to happen a generation ago. Students can—and sometimes should—say no to certain clerkships. There are material tradeoffs worth considering. (And for more, see former Judge Gregg Costa, here.) But they are hard tradeoffs, and ones not always intuitive to law students barely a semester into law school.

I’m sure this post will not be popular with judges. But, on the flip side, I might suggest that law students in 2024 have much more to consider when committing to a job that takes them into the year 2030, and perhaps some recallibration is in order.

UPDATE August 2, 2024: I’m very grateful for the extended feedback I’ve received on the post, with a lot of mixed feelings! I thought a few additional thoughts might be in order.

First, as I emphasize, I think judicial clerkships are a great thing! I think they add tremendous value for the bulk of law students, particularly those who are interested in litigation. As I write, “It is valuable, to be sure. It is the experience, the credential, seeing what goes on inside a judicial chambers.” Do not lose sight of the good things! The post, however, focuses on “some” clerkships, particularly stacking clerkships, and some of the tradeoffs that come.

Second, I think the decision of many judges to move away from hiring new grads to grads with work experience is a suboptimal thing. I highlight some of the reasons for the tradeoffs in the post, and I entirely understand why judges would prefer to do it. But I think it is worth exploring—in another lengthy blog post, perhaps!—about what the temporary clerkship role is and what it ought to be. That is, what is the reason for temporary as opposed to career clerks? What is the mentorship that is expected, or preferred, in the temporary role, if any? It’s another heavy exchange worth considering.

Third, things are heavily context-specific. It is quite possible that a second or third clerkship, stacking clerkships, moving frequently, will be good things for you in your individualized situation. But, I think, the value is probably less than many anticipate, and there are hard questions and tradeoffs that should be asked and answered. I cannot give complete guidance because every situation is different—quite literally idiosyncratic. But it is worth having an honest conversation, and I think these are some of the questions that can help students figure things out.

Fourth, it would be nice to have a lot more data than the limited data sets I have and the anecdotal compilations I have here. It would be nice to know how students with one clerkship v. multiple feel about it after the fact. It would be nice to track their careers. It would be nice to evaluate whether clerking immediately after graduation or taking time to work is helpful. It would be nice to know if people didn’t have to move but could clerk in the same city as their job, or clerk twice in the same city, made the experience better. I just don’t know. But these are questions that, I think, are worth asking and exploring.

Prior clerkship experience of Supreme Court clerks has changed dramatically in the last 10 and 20 years

David Lat’s tireless efforts to chronicle the hiring of Supreme Court clerks prompted me to look at a trend that’s developed in recent years. It increasingly appears that multiple clerkships are a prerequisite to securing a Supreme Court clerkship. So I looked at the data for this October Term 2023 class, along with comparisons to the credentials of the OT2013 and OT2003 classes. The results were pretty dramatic. (I looked only at the 36 clerks of the active justices, and the 35 when Chief Justice Rehnquist served on the Court and only hired three clerks instead of the usual four.)

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For OT2003, just twenty years ago, 33 clerks came off of one previous court of appeals clerkship, and just two others had multiple clerkships (one of which was not on the federal court of appeals). In 2013, the number off a single prior court of appeals clerkship had dropped to 25. Another nine had two prior clerkships (one of which was not court of appeals), and two more had newer development of two separate court of appeals clerkships. Today, for October Term 2023, just seven of the 36 clerks came from one prior court of appeals clerkship. Fourteen had two prior clerkships, at least one of which was not on the federal court of appeals. And 11 had two prior court of appeals clerkships, and four with the novel development of three prior clerkships.

I’ve lamented that the hoops to jump through for a law school teaching position often involve a series of short-term stints and moves over a course of a few short years. Likewise, I’m not sure this is a particularly welcome development. Admittedly, Supreme Court clerks are a fraction of career outcomes. But many more, I think, are likewise chasing similar credentials of serial clerkships even if they do not get a Supreme Court clerkship in the end. I am not sure that it redounds to the benefit of law students, who as fourth or fifth year associates have much higher billing rates and expectations, but much less practical experience in the actual practice of law. For judges, I am sure that clerks with experience are beneficial, but in previous eras that role may have been given to a career clerk. I don’t know what the longer-term ramifications are, but it’s a trend I’m watching.

How can we measure the influence of President Biden's court of appeals judges?

Recent media reports have been discussing President Joe Biden’s influence on the federal judiciary, including the rapid pace of nominating and ensuring confirmation of federal judges. And it’s been something of a proxy for “influence “ or “impact.” It’s true that more judges participating in argument and voting in panels, particularly judges on the federal courts of appeals, is one way of measuring influence.

But another way to measure influence could be to examine written appellate opinions. And it appears President Biden’s court of appeals judges are publishing opinions (at least, in their names) less frequently than other recent judges.

This is hard to measure comparatively across years, of course. For instance, the workloads of the court can change (consider the decline in cases before the Federal Circuit in recent years, for instance). The number of filled seats for active judges, and the workload of senior judges, can change. Consider, for example, that new appointees to a court that is shorthanded probably have much more work than new appointees to a court that has no vacancies, and a court with many active senior judges may have less of a workload of new appointees than a court without many such judges. The practices on each circuit vary wildly in terms of how often decisions are published per curiam or with summary orders rather than in the name of a judge. Getting up to speed if one was confirmed in the middle of a pandemic (say, summer of 2021) may have looked different than previous eras. In short, there are myriad reasons for differences.

Regardless of the reason, there may still be changes in output. I dug into the Westlaw database to try to collect some information and make some comparisons. Using the “JU( )” field (and later, the “DIS( )” and “CON( )” fields joined with the “PA( )” field), I looked at the 10 judges President Biden had confirmed in the first year of his presidency (really, calendar year 2021). (I excluded now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was elevated to the Supreme Court in the middle of this window.) All judges were confirmed 14 to 20 months ago. I tried to exclude judges sitting by designation, names shared with others judges, Westlaw’s odd way of handling en banc, and so on, with a quick perusal of results and adjustment to totals.

These 10 Biden-appointed court of appeals judges from 2021 have combined for around 140 majority, named-author opinions (regardless of whether these opinions were “precedential” or "non-precedential”) through mid-February 2023. That’s around 14 per judge. (These 10 judges have also combined for around 31 concurring or dissenting opinions.)

I then went to President Donald Trump’s nominees. They had some similarities: there were 12 court of appeals nominees in 2017, confirmed between 14 and 21 months before February 16, 2019. These 12 judges combined for around 415 majority, named-author opinions. That’s around 34 per judge. (These 12 judges also combined for around 60 concurring or dissenting opinions.)

President Barack Obama had only three federal appellate judges confirmed in his first year. They combined for around 80 majority opinions by mid-February 2011.

As I mentioned, these are rough figures, likely off by a few in one direction or another, as the Westlaw fields are imprecise and I had to cull some data on my own with quick checks. There are probably other ways of looking at the data, including the number of arguments held, the length of time from argument to an issued opinion on a case by case basis, and so on. It’s also a very short window so far, and it’s possible that once the years stretch one we’ll see some smoothing out of the trends. But so far, Biden’s court of appeals appointees have been publishing fewer majority opinions in their names. That’s not to say their influence may not be felt elsewhere, particularly in shaping opinions authored by other judges, in per curiam or unsigned opinions, and so on. It also is not a measure of the influence of any particular opinion, as not all opinions are the same, and some have more impact than others. As I mentioned, the reason has many complexities one could consider. But on this one dimension of frequency, however, so far, there’s been a different pace.

Elite federal clerkships don't reflect the whole universe of student clerkship opportunities

Much has been written about disputes or “boycotts” of federal judges hiring clerks from particular law schools. But reviewing clerkships generally reveals that the debate right now is a niche subset of student employment opportunities.

It’s a very small subset of elite, “credentialed” clerkships in dispute at the moment. There are about 800 active federal judges not counting dozens, probably hundreds more active senior federal judges. They hire around 1200 or so recent law school graduates in term (one or two year) positions each year, not counting the many post-graduate hires or career clerks.

Schools like Montana, Alabama, Kentucky, Memphis, and West Virginia routinely outplace NYU, Georgetown, and Columbia as a percentage of their graduates going on to federal clerkships right after graduation.

But the dialogue is obsessive about Yale (which places around 50 graduates a year into federal clerkships, and many more after graduation), with a sliver of judges like Judge James Ho on the 5th Circuit. Why?

The subset of elite, “credentialed” clerkships.

A peril of a set of highly credentialed, very young, former Supreme Court clerks nominated to the federal judiciary of late is increasingly sharp elbow among judges to be on the next Supreme Court “short list” (which, most recently for a Republican administration, appeared to include around 40 names, which is hardly short). That’s increasing competition for elite, pedigreed clerks.

The discussions of these clerks, as hired through an ideological valence, about reverence for their former Supreme Court bosses, about being “feeders” of clerks to the Court, and so on, all run this channel. But in truth, it’s a tiny fraction of the clerkship opportunities for law school graduates.

So many clerkships are about geographical fit, about helping launch careers of new graduates into a federal territory where they’ll ultimately practice and be ambassadors for the court (not judge the judge). The vast majority of the federal docket, too, is not about abortion or other hot-button topics, but grinding through 922(g) sentencing or suppression hearings or Social Security appeals or immigration disputes. It’s a judge working very closely with a very small team to draft work product.

In the elite subset of credentialed clerkships, there’s a lot to say about judicial hiring practices, complaints about it, ideological screens and preferences, and so on. But the vast majority of the federal clerkship experience, and the work, is nothing like the debate over the narrow subset that’s attracting significant attention. To the extent there are calls for “reform,” I hope those in positions of authority are mindful of this disparity as the conversation continues to play out.

Biden experiences unprecedented hot streak with ABA judicial nominee ratings

I’ve blogged about the ABA’s judicial nominee ratings, wondering whether the ABA was any good at evaluating nominees. You can take a look at its historical ratings.

But President Joe Biden is experiencing an unprecedented hot streak. He’s had 100 ABA judicial nominee evaluations returned, and not a single one of them had a single “not qualified” vote among them.

Mr. Biden is the third president, joining Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, to reject the ABA’s “pre-screening” power in evaluating judicial nominees. In the past, a president would submit potential nominees to the ABA and receive a rating back. Most of the time, a majority “not qualified” vote would sink the potential nominee, and the person would never face a formal nomination. Mr. Bush first broke the tradition on grounds that the ABA tended to give more conservative nominees lower ratings than more progressive nominees.

President Barack Obama resumed the tradition. In his first three years, the ABA, apparently, gave outright “not qualified” ratings (a majority vote of “not qualified”) to 14 potential nominees. For another 7 nominees, the ABA gave a minority vote of “not qualified.”

As a point of comparison (Democratic to Democratic administrations), Mr. Biden has zero, majority or minority “not qualified.” That’s a remarkable achievement. Given how many candidates Mr. Obama named who received a “not qualified,” it suggests some combination of White House vetting and ABA reviewing have changed, although it’s entirely unclear how to measure this. But it does show that Mr. Biden is on an unprecedented hot streak.

Federal judges have already begun to drift away from hiring Yale Law clerks

On the heels of the latest controversy at Yale Law School, which David Lat ably describes over at Original Jurisdiction, a federal judge penned an email to fellow judges: “The latest events at Yale Law School, in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech, prompt me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified from potential clerkships.”

The truth is, Yale Law has already seen falling clerkship placement numbers in recent years. Incidents like this may harden some judges’ opposition. (There are caveats, of course, about what factors affect a judges hiring practices, the political salience of the issues here, and so on.)

I closely track federal judicial clerkship placement, and I have in recent years included a three-year average of clerkship placement in a report I release every two years. The latest version of that report is here. But we can look at some trends among a handful of schools. I select eight of the (historically) highest-performing: Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Harvard, Duke, Virginia, Michigan, and UC-Irvine. I’ll look at the last eight years’ placement. (Any choice of schools and window of time is a bit arbitrary, and I could go back for more data or more schools if I wanted. I didn’t look at 2012 or earlier data, so I don’t know what I’m missing with this cutoff.)

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Let me start by pointing out that the total placement among recent graduates has been fairly steady (see the chart). Schools report between 1150 and 1250 placements per year.

Some declines may well be attributable to vacancies in the federal judiciary that were unfilled. It does not appear that there is a “trend” of hiring materially fewer recent law school graduates in favor of clerks with work experience.

But this means that there’s roughly a fixed set of possible clerkship positions each year. If some schools are declining in placement we would expect to see other schooling improvement in placement. We can’t necessarily make those as one-to-one tradeoffs (e.g., a judge “stops” hiring from Yale and “starts” hiring from Chicago), but we can watch some aggregate trends.

I’ll start with percentage of graduates placed into a full-time, long-term federal clerkship. Admittedly, this doesn’t capture those who work then clerk. But there is some consistency in the reporting of data over the years. It makes no distinction among competitiveness of clerkships or types of judges (e.g., appellate or district court). Percentages can also fluctuate with the class size or be deceptive based on class size; I’ll dig into the raw figures in a moment.

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A few items stand out. Yale would typically place between 25% and 35% of its class into federal clerkships. Its number is low in 2020, but not the lowest in this time period. A couple of times, Stanford has placed a higher percentage of clerks than Yale.

But noteworthy is Chicago’s climb, from 10% of the class in 2013 to a whopping 27.6% in 2020, for the first time in recent memory besting Yale.

A few other trends are noteworthy. Apart from Irvine’s decline (which may coincide with the departure of founding Dean Erwin Chemerinsky), we see that the University of Virginia placing fourth with 17.5% placement. It’s done well in recent years, including occasionally edging out Harvard, but (apart from a 2017 dip) shows a trendline of consistent and perhaps improving placement.

Let’s now look at the raw totals of placement. Recall that these figures are going to help assess placement into the market of roughly 1150 to 1250 total new clerks a year.

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Harvard tops the list, as its 15-20% placement into clerkships still means a whopping 80 to 120 clerks a year, given its tremendous class size. But, it is notable to see it at an eight-year low in placement. Yale, which had consistently been second in raw placement for the previous seven years, has slipped to fourth in 2020, as both Chicago (56) and Virginia (55) placed more federal clerks than Yale (52).

Now, it’s perhaps no coincidence that Yale graduates just 197 students in the Class of 2020, its smallest class in this eight-year period, and perhaps correspondingly saw a decline in overall placement in different ways. Still, federal judges needed clerks in 2020. They simply looked elsewhere at slightly higher rates.

But at a larger level, it’s worth noting that federal judges do change their hiring preferences, and we may be witnessing some of that right now, regardless of whether some judges are “investigating” whether some graduates of some law schools have acted in a disruptive manner at a public event. There are, of course, any number of reasons why federal judges looked elsewhere, returning to a point at the top of this post. It could be that law students at some law schools, more than others, are self-selecting out of applying to federal judges (option for lucrative large law firm placement, competitive government positions, or the booming public interest sector).

And finally, it could also be that this blip is hardly a “trend,” and we’ll wait for a month to see what the Class of 2021 figures show.

"Brnovich, election-law tradeoffs, and the limited role of the courts"

I have this essay at SCOTUSblog, “Brnovich, election-law tradeoffs, and the limited role of the courts.” It begins:

Arizona “generally makes it quite easy for residents to vote.” This framing from Justice Samuel Alito in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee set the path for the six-justice majority of the Supreme Court to reject challenges to two Arizona laws.

It marks a major victory for states that seek to innovate or tinker with their election laws — to expand them or to contract them. And it is the latest in a string of cases pushing the federal courts out of second-guessing state election laws.

And from near the end:

Brnovich is the latest in a line of cases suggesting that the federal courts should play a smaller role in the patrolling of how states administer elections. Crawford approved Indiana’s voter-identification law. The court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause said that federal courts should not entertain challenges to partisan gerrymandering under the Constitution. In 2020, it decided a series of cases, including Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, which mostly instructed federal courts not to make late-breaking changes to how states administer elections, even in the middle of a pandemic. And it rejected a challenge to the presidential election in Texas v. Pennsylvania, letting state election officials’ decisions stand.

Without ABA, Biden judicial nominations rolling along

According to the Heritage Foundation’s “judicial appointments tracker,” President Joe Biden has more confirmed judicial appointments through July 7 of his first term (7) than the last six presidents combined (6). Granted, President Donald Trump confirmed a Supreme Court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, in that window. But despite the Trump administration leaving relatively few vacancies, federal judges began retiring at an extraordinary clip at the beginning of the Biden administration. And the Senate, despite a 50-50 partisan divide, has moved expeditiously with nominations, aided by the decline of the filibuster for judicial nominations.

But it’s probably the Biden administration’s decision to dispense with the American Bar Association’s approval process that has expedited the process most of all in these early days. Since the George W. Bush and Trump administrations also dispensed with the ABA, it’s not clear that any administration will pre-clear nominations with it. Indeed, it is likely the Obama administration’s experience and frustration with the ABA’s process that made the decision for Obama-Biden alumni. Without the ABA’s pre-approval process, the Biden administration has been able to move much more quickly and much earlier on any given vacancy.

And the ABA has given glowing recommendations to every nominee thus far. We’ll see if that shine fades in the future, but it’s worth emphasizing a separate frustration from the Obama administration was the ABA’s decision to rate a number of its prospective nominees as “not qualified,” which the Obama administration dutifully scuttled. The Biden administration, it appears, would have no such plan to do so, and so it’s a wait-and-see approach if the ABA ever deems one of Mr. Biden’s nominees to be “not qualified.”

DOJ attorneys routinely mocked 2020 conspiracy theories ahead of January 6

From Professor Rick Hasen, the House Oversight Committee has documents showing the pressure that Mark Meadows and others in the White House had on the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of fraud. Principal officers in the Department of Justice, from my reading, ever flinched. Several resigned in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. But two emails struck me.

First was an email January 1 from Mr. Meadows to Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Mr. Meadows alleged “signature match anomalies in Fulton county, Ga.” Mr. Rosen forwarded the email to another, “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to the message below.”

Second was an email forwarded by Mr. Meadows to Mr. Rosen, with the title—I can’t make it up—”Brad Johnson: Rome, Satellites, Servers: an Update - YouTube.” Richard Donaghue at the Department of Justice emailed Mr. Rose, “Pure insanity.” Mr. Rosen responded about why these conspiracy theorists never brought evidence to the FBI, and about why he would not discuss these matters with Rudy Giuliani.

In short, the conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election never got off the ground within any faction of the officials in the Department of Justice.