DAVIS
Mike

• 1. Career

Mike Davis is an American lawyer, conservative political strategist, and adviser. He was Chief Counsel for Nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and the founder and president of the Article III Project (A3P).

He is a staunch defender and ally of Donald Trump and was rumored to be one of his candidates for Attorney General.

Career

After law school, he worked on the George W. Bush 2004 re-election campaign which got him a job, in 2005, in Bush's Office of Political Affairs. There he met Neil Gorsuch who helped him land a job at the U.S. Justice Department in 2006 as a special assistant US Attorney. Later Davis gave Gorsuch's resume to the White House as Gorsuch sought a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit - a job he got. After 7 months at Justice, Davis started clerking for Gorsuch in Colorado.

In 2007 he stopped clerking and worked for Greenberg Traurig as a litigation associate and in 2010 he took the same job for the Wheeler Trigg O'Donnell Law firm.

In 2012, Davis left Wheeler and started his own law practice - MRDLaw where he worked until 2017 and then returned to in 2023. His law firm's website claims that from 2013 to 2017 he was also a Special Assistant Attorney General of Colorado.

When Trump was elected president in 2016, Davis pushed to have Gorsuch nominated to fill the vacancy held open by Mitch McConnell; and when Gorsuch was nominated, he campaigned for his confirmation. He then clerked for Gorsuch again during his first four months on the court.

Davis moved from clerking for Gorsuch to the position of Chief Counsel for Nominations for Chairman Grassley and other senators on the judiciary committee in July 2017. He was staff lead for 30 hearings and 41 markup meetings over the next two years. He oversaw the floor votes for 278 nominees, including the contentious confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He unsuccessfully tried to keep Christine Blasey Ford's testimony about Kavanaugh from being heard, but was able to keep Deborah Ramirez, who attended Yale University with Kavanaugh and said he had thrust his penis in her face at a dorm party, from being called to testify. He was also “key in withholding documents relating to Kavanaugh’s work in the White House.”

Davis left Grassley’s staff in January 2019 to create the Article III Project, which claims to defend "constitutionalist judges and the rule of law" and was originally to work closely with the Federalist Society.

In 2020, when Trump's relationship with the Federalist Society frayed over his efforts to overturn the election, Davis took advantage of the opening, distanced himself from them, echoed Trump's calls for "retribution" and during the 2024 campaign vowed to help him pick "fearless" judges who were less impartial.

In 2021, Davis founded the Unsilenced Majority, a group committed to challenging Cancel Culture and pushing back against liberal influencers, alongside the Internet Accountability Project (IAP), which advocates for stricter oversight of Big Tech. The Article III Project and the Internet Accountability Project together raised about $1 million as of 2022, of which nearly $700,000 was routed to Davis or to a business he owns, according to IRS filings.

For part of 2024, he served on the University of Iowa's Alumni Advisory Board - individuals who gather annually on campus and annually online - but left after Trump was re-elected. They also contribute to a fund that supports the department and assist with various tasks, such as “selecting the undergraduate paper award winners, advising the department on undergraduate programs/internships, and assisting with fundraising for internship programs.”

In 2025, Trump appointed Stephen Kenny the Republican National Committee’s lead elections attorney to the White House Counsel’s office to work on judicial nominations. Because Kenny is ally of Davis' it was seen as a sign of the influence Davis would have on lifetime legal appointments.