Jenna Ellis, a senior authorized adviser to the Trump marketing campaign, isn’t the kind of lawyer she performs on TV.

HomeUS Politics

Jenna Ellis, a senior authorized adviser to the Trump marketing campaign, isn’t the kind of lawyer she performs on TV.

Jenna Ellis broke into the authorized career in 2012 as a deputy district lawyer in Weld County, Colo., a largely rural space that might quickly ma


Jenna Ellis broke into the authorized career in 2012 as a deputy district lawyer in Weld County, Colo., a largely rural space that might quickly make headlines for a failed try to secede from the remainder of the state as a result of some residents resented the rising dominance of extra liberal communities to the south like Denver. Ms. Ellis prosecuted crimes like theft and assault, felonies of a distinct magnitude from the claims of sweeping fraud and felony conspiracy she makes immediately as a prime lawyer to President Trump.

It wasn’t lengthy earlier than she parlayed her regulation diploma and expertise as a prosecutor into jobs that thrust her past her nook of the state: She took a place with James Dobson, the evangelical heavyweight, joined the school at Colorado Christian College and began showing on Denver radio as a authorized commentator.

By late 2018, common viewers of cable information would come to know Ms. Ellis as a “constitutional regulation lawyer” — her most popular title — who aggressively got here to Mr. Trump’s protection as he confronted investigation and impeachment.

However a assessment of her skilled historical past, in addition to interviews with greater than a half-dozen legal professionals who’ve labored along with her, present that Ms. Ellis, 36, isn’t the seasoned constitutional regulation skilled she performs on TV.

In some ways, that makes her excellent for the function she has now original for herself: She is a star participant within the president’s theater of grievance and denial whose lack of related expertise with the authorized questions at hand has had no obvious bearing on her means to current herself as somebody of nice authority.

Since she graduated regulation college in 2011, nothing in her document within the courtroom — restricted principally to appearances in state courtroom as a prosecutor or as counsel for shoppers charged with assault, prostitution, theft and home abuse — reveals any time spent litigating election regulation instances.

She holds herself out as an skilled on the Structure based mostly on her self-published ebook and her educating of pre-law lessons to undergraduates. She has by no means appeared in federal district or circuit courtroom, the place most constitutional issues are thought-about, in line with nationwide databases of federal instances, and doesn’t seem to have performed a serious function in any instances past her felony and civil work in Colorado.

On paper, the Trump marketing campaign calls her a senior authorized adviser. She has not too long ago appeared alongside Rudolph W. Giuliani and different Trump legal professionals — a gaggle Ms. Ellis described as an “elite strike pressure group” — at public hearings the place she amplified the president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.

In a written assertion responding to questions on her document, Ms. Ellis described herself as “a extremely skilled and extremely certified lawyer and skilled in my area.” Any assertions on the contrary “forged me in a false gentle,” she stated. The Trump marketing campaign supplied the identify of 1 federal case through which it stated Ms. Ellis had participated, in 2012, when she was a 12 months out of regulation college. However her identify isn’t among the many legal professionals listed within the choice, and the case was not heard in an everyday federal courtroom, however reasonably in an administrative tribunal.



www.nytimes.com