While I was at lunch, I received this amusing inquiry from Rolling Stone politics editor Andrew Perez:
I was reviewing this brief filed by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Supreme Court’s mifepristone case, and the metadata shows it was authored by Jonathan Mitchell. I presume that means Jonathan Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who wrote SB 8 since he has worked with the Fillmore Law Firm.
He’s not listed as a counsel on the brief, so we’d love to know why that is. Is it fair to say that Jonathan Mitchell ghostwrote your brief?
An additional question: EPPC filed a similar brief earlier pressing the Supreme Court to take up the mifepristone case. The metadata on that earlier brief lists [redacted] as the author. Who is she and who does or did she work for?
Here is the response I just sent Mr. Perez:
No, Jonathan Mitchell did not write one word of the brief (which you will discover draws very heavily on blog posts that I wrote over a year ago).
Our local counsel was looking for a template for the brief that complies with the Supreme Court’s complicated formatting requirements, and he borrowed a template from one of Jonathan’s briefs.
[Redacted] assisted us with formatting the earlier brief.
I’m guessing that I’ve ruined my chance to appear in Rolling Stone. (By the way, Perez also botches his summary of the position in our earlier brief.)
Update (3:15 p.m.): I evidently grossly overestimated Perez’s integrity. In a follow-up email, he tells me: “we will note he [Mitchell] was listed in the metadata and you say he didn’t write that brief.” (My italics.) My brief obviously draws heavily from these blog posts I wrote in January 2023 and from four previous amicus briefs I submitted at various stages in the same matter that didn’t have the misleading metadata. No reasonable person could continue to entertain Perez’s delusion. What a malicious hack.