Musk Lawyer Tries to Build a Powerhouse Firm With a Billionaire Client

New York Times

31-01-2025

Several top Republican lawyers are joining forces with the lawyer for the billionaire Elon Musk in hopes of building a new conservative legal powerhouse.
Chris Gober, a swaggering Texas-based lawyer who has represented Mr. Musk in high-profile political fights for the last year, has hired four lawyers from Holtzman Vogel, a top law firm that recently drew the ire of some allies of President Trump.
The move is yet another sign of the expanding influence of Mr. Musk in big-money Republican politics.
Mr. Musk is the Republican Party's top donor and has become one of Mr. Trump's closest advisers. That rise has empowered those in Mr. Musk's orbit, as well.
Mr. Gober has said that his enlarged firm, now called Lex Politica, drew inspiration from an unlikely source: Marc Elias, the Democratic Party's own superlawyer, who has consolidated power in the Democratic legal world and influenced his party in a way that no political lawyer on the right has.
'His law firm is synonymous with the progressive movement,' Mr. Gober said of Mr. Elias in an interview. 'And that's what we want to do: Build the law firm that is synonymous with the conservative movement.'
A spokesman for Mr. Elias's law firm declined to comment.
Mr. Gober says he expects Lex Politica to be the primary outside counsel for the House and Senate Republican campaign arms, as well as for House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, and, of course, Mr. Musk. It was not immediately clear how much of Holtzman Vogel's business Mr. Gober's firm would take.
The two more prominent Holtzman Vogel lawyers joining Mr. Gober are Jessica Furst Johnson, who has served as the general counsel for the campaign committees in the past, and Steve Roberts, who represents Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate who initially helped Mr. Musk lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Gober described the hires, which also included Christine Fort, an Arizona-based partner at Holtzman Vogel, and Nicole Kelly, a senior associate there, with a touch of the bravado often shown by Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump, calling their recruitment the 'biggest political coup in the political law world that anybody has seen to date.'
Some Trump advisers publicly criticized Holtzman Vogel during the 2024 campaign cycle after a top Republican lawyer at the firm, Jason Torchinsky, researched on behalf of a client whether Mr. Trump could be disqualified from the ballot using the 14th Amendment. That larger effort ultimately failed, but some Republicans now perceive Holtzman Vogel, accurately or not, as an establishment firm in a party led by a president who likes to hold grudges.
Jill Holtzman Vogel, the firm's founder, said she wished Mr. Gober's recruits 'well' but bristled at Mr. Gober's framing of their departure as a 'coup.'
'They are taking two nonequity partners out of a 50-lawyer firm with the largest political and MAGA practice in the country,' she said.
Mr. Musk appears to exert a gravitational pull for ambitious Republicans, and many have shown an eagerness to get close to him since he started spending his billions.
Mr. Gober last year helped Mr. Musk create his super PAC, America PAC, which spent over $250 million to help elect Mr. Trump. Most prominently, Mr. Gober represented Mr. Musk in a Pennsylvania court case that sought to end a petition drive in which Mr. Musk awarded up to $1 million to swing-state voters. Mr. Gober successfully defeated that effort just before Election Day.
Mr. Gober said Mr. Musk had taken his firm 'more mainstream and put us more on the map,' adding that Mr. Musk was an unusual client who prompted him to 'change the way that I practice law.'
'The level of risk tolerance and what we have the latitude to do and try is an absolute game-changer," Mr. Gober said of working with Mr. Musk. Using the abbreviation for 'return on investment,' he added, 'He's willing to spend money on things that others might say, 'Well, that's just not historically been the best R.O.I. or the way we do things.''
Mr. Gober continued, 'It's a completely different experience working with a PAC that has — I don't want to say a limitless budget, but you don't take things off the table because of price.'