This post originally appeared on Wired.
Lawfair, founded by the well-known litigator Adam Mortara, is a boutique right-wing firm currently engaged by the state of Tennessee to provide counsel on a contentious Supreme Court case that could affect the availability of gender-affirming care for transgender minors across the country. Aside from Mortara, the only other lawyer known to have worked or done work for the firm is a project-based contract attorney named Christopher Roach. He no longer does so, after WIRED asked questions about his apparent ties—revealed exclusively in this story for the first time—to online accounts with a long history of posting white supremacist and antisemitic content.
“America, frankly, would be a much more civilized, safe, wealthy, and orderly place, but for its minorities,” wrote one of the accounts.
Mortara, a former Clarence Thomas clerk and current lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, founded Lawfair in 2020. While working with a different firm, he was the lead trial lawyer representing Students for Fair Admissions in its case against Harvard, which later advanced to the Supreme Court—a ruling that gutted affirmative action. He is also, according to an appointment letter provided to WIRED by Tennessee’s attorney general’s office that was addressed to him through Lawfair LLC, currently being retained for $10,000 a month by Governor Bill Lee to “assist the State and the Office of the Attorney General with complex and sophisticated litigation, regulatory matters, and client advice.” Specifically, the firm is working on a case about whether the state's ban on gender-affirming hormone care for transgender minors is in violation of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. If the court sides with Tennessee, it would significantly impact access to treatments like puberty blockers and hormone treatment. The case was picked up by the Supreme Court in June, and arguments are set to be heard this fall.
Aside from Mortara, the only other lawyer known to have done work for or with Lawfair—and the person tied to the online accounts with a history of racist posting—is Roach, a University of Chicago–educated attorney and an adjunct fellow at the Center for American Greatness, a prominent conservative group. (Its publisher has been a fellow at the hugely influential Claremont Institute, which is listed as a member of the Project 2025 advisory board.) According to Florida’s bar registration website, Roach is based in Tampa, Florida.
In response to a request for comment from WIRED for this story, Mortara told WIRED that he was “not aware of these abhorrent statements, which do not reflect our values,” adding that following WIRED’s revelations, Roach is “no longer affiliated with the firm.” He also said that Roach did not work on the gender-affirming-care case for the state of Tennessee and was not involved with the Students for Fair Admission case. Roach’s online résumé, which up until then listed Lawfair as his employer, was quickly changed to omit mention of it.
Roach himself did not respond to WIRED’s phone calls, text messages, and emails while this story was being reported. He did respond hours after this article was published, confirming he authored the referenced posts. He said that the "material and remarks ... no longer reflect my views," but didn't respond when asked when this change of heart happened and why it came about.
The questions WIRED asked Mortara about Roach concerned a decades-old online trail of deeply racist and antisemitic writings and social media posts by accounts linked to Roach. Those links were shown in research provided exclusively to WIRED by software engineer Travis Brown, who previously helped reveal that former Brooklyn real estate broker Chaya Raichik was the person behind the hate-filled, anti-trans LibsofTikTok account.
Brown’s research, which WIRED independently confirmed, ties Roach to a Twitter account that used different names over the years, such as “Roman Dmowski,” a reference to an antisemitic Polish nationalist, and “Blessed Groyper,” a reference to the name used by followers of notorious white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
The account, which appears to have been suspended in 2022, is littered with openly racist, white supremacist, and antisemitic comments.
“You’re a zero empathy monster,” the account wrote in a 2020 post in response to a Black mother asking who would protect her children from gun violence.“You are a disgrace to the human race. Actually white lives matter the Most and are the most important bc we are the most productive and innocent ppl on this planet.”
In another response to the same post, the account added: “I’m making sure my kids are white and that they don’t encounter any more minorities than absolutely necessary bc 13do50.” This last term is coded language used by white supremacists. The number 13 falsely references the percentage of the American population that’s Black; the 50 refers to the supposed percentage of all murders committed by Black people in the US. The Anti Defamation League has described the term as “racist propaganda.”
In another post from 2019, the account dismissed the death of a counter protester at the Unite the Right rally in 2017, writing: “One chick died in a car accident in Charlottesville and they act like it's Anuddah Shoah”—a phrase popularized by white supremacists to mock Jews and the Holocaust. In another post, the account complained that “any exploration of Jewish wrongdoing as a source of German hostility is verbotten [sic].”
Brown was able to link the anonymous Twitter account to Roach through an email address. Using data from a massive leak in 2022 in which over 200 million email addresses of Twitter users were posted online, Brown found that the Twitter account was registered with a Yahoo email address that features Roach’s surname and a location where, according to his LinkedIn account, he worked for four years at the beginning of the 2000s.
WIRED was able to independently link this same email address to Roach via records found in public databases and further confirm its connection to Roach. A “Chris R.” using the Yahoo address to post reviews on Google, for example, included a photo of his house alongside a favorable review of a Tampa-area housepainter. That house, according to Hillsborough County property tax records, belongs to Roach.
The Yahoo email address ties Roach to repeated postings of racist material. It was used, for instance, in a 2007 email sent to and published on VDare, a notorious site that according to the Southern Poverty Law Center acts as a bridge between the mainstream Republican Party and the fringe white nationalist right, by a user named “Chris Roach.”
Roach was writing to VDare to complain about being “unceremoniously dumped” from writing for the online magazine of the America’s Future Foundation (AFF), a young conservative group in Washington. (While Roach’s posts on AFF are now deleted, WIRED has reviewed archived material on that website with the byline “Chris Roach.” In a biography on the site, he writes that he “studied the Great Books at the University of Chicago under some really great professors … I stayed for Law School and am now an attorney in private practice.” This biography lines up exactly with Roach’s, according to his LinkedIn profile.)
In his VDare email, Roach alleges that AFF’s executive director, David Kirby, fired him for comments Roach made on a post at the paleoconservative blog Eunomia, claiming Kirby told him, “There's no place in AFF's mission to provide space for someone who posts comments and content like this.” (AFF and Kirby did not respond to a request for comment.)
Roach didn’t say what the comments were, but an archived copy of the comment section to which his email linked reviewed by WIRED shows deeply racist remarks from a user named “Roach.” “America, frankly, would be a much more civilized, safe, wealthy, and orderly place, but for its minorities,” the author of the comment wrote, asserting there is “something deeply evil in the culture of black America and the souls of black Americans.” The poster denied being racist, but advocated for “special black schools, higher rates of discipline for black students, different standards of discipline for black young people, black colleges, segregation in prisons, much higher rates of black imprisonment, racial profiling, and, most important of all, simply a willingness to say, ‘We will control blacks when they get out of control.’”
The VDare email also asked readers to click on a link to Mansizedtarget.com, a site described as “paleoconservative observations” written by an author whose name was displayed, according to archived copies, first as “Mr. Roach” and then as “Roman Dmowski.” (At one point, the Google reviews account tied to Roach and to the Yahoo email address evidently used “mansizedtar” as a screen name, given a response to a review in which a business owner addresses the user of the account by that name. After WIRED contacted Roach about the online posts, archived copies of the Mansizedtarget website on the Wayback machine were removed.)
Over the years Roach’s name, or a variation of his name, has appeared on a range of different right-wing and extremist sites.
The “Blessed Groyper” Twitter account shared links on several occasions to articles written by Christopher Roach for the website American Greatness. Roach, whose image appears next to his byline, has been a prolific contributor, writing 337 articles over the last seven years. In the past 12 months, Roach has covered major right-wing culture-war topics from opposing gun control measures to pushing election conspiracies, defending the January 6 insurrectionists, and labeling those concerned about the spread of Covid-19 as “fanatics.”
Roach describes himself as an “adjunct fellow” at the organization that publishes American Greatness, the Center for American Greatness—a right-wing think tank that has been funded by dark money. Neither the Center for American Greatness nor its publisher, Buskirk, responded to a request for comment.
Roach, as noted in his author bio at American Greatness, has also written for Taki’s Magazine, another paleoconservative blog that has hosted content from far-right figures like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes as well as white nationalists Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer.
An account called “Roach” was also extremely active in the comment section of extremist website Occidental Dissent, which is run by Brad Griffin, a prominent member of the neo-Confederate, secessionist group League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group.
Accounts using Roach’s name or his known aliases, such as Mansizedtarget and Roman Dmowski, have also posted on the gun-focused forum Sniper’s Hide and a Jeep Wrangler fan site known as Wrangler Forum.
Roach was, until recently, one of just two people who stated they worked for Lawfair LLC, according to LinkedIn. The other person is founder Mortara, who is based in Tennessee, where the company is also registered.
Mortara, who graduated from the University of Chicago Law School after earning an undergraduate degree there and a masters in astrophysics from Cambridge, is formerly a clerk for Clarence Thomas. The justice’s clerks have over the years created a powerful network of conservative leaders in the legal system, media, and at the highest levels of government.
In one comment section on a 2008 blog about Michelle Obama’s college thesis, a user identified as mansizedtarget.com said they had worked on the “Gratz/Grutter Michigan affirmative action cases.” Both cases were argued in front of the Supreme Court during the period Mortara clerked for Thomas.
Following almost two decades at the high-profile Bartlit Beck firm in Chicago, where he specialized in intellectual property cases, Mortara formed Lawfair LLC, which he describes as a “civil and voting rights” firm. Mortara has also been a lecturer in law at the University of Chicago, which did not respond to a request for comment, since 2007. In the past decade-plus, he has been involved in litigation concerning redistricting efforts amongst the state legislatures of Texas and Wisconsin. In the latter, he teamed up with the firm that had represented former president Donald Trump and the RNC, and pocketed what was projected to be nearly $200,000 in fees.
Lawfair LLC has virtually no online presence, including no website and no social media presence, which Alejandra Caraballo, an instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, tells WIRED is not unusual.
“It's a boutique firm from a connected attorney,” says Caraballo. “They basically only litigate culture war cases (hence the name lawfair). It works through political connections.”
Earlier this month, The Tennessean reported on an August 2023 letter signed by Tennessee governor Bill Lee approving payment of $10,000 a month for up to two years to Lawfair LLC for its work on the gender-affirming-care case.
“The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office retained Adam Mortara, one of the finest litigators in America, as outside counsel and has not ever had a relationship with any other attorneys from Lawfair, LLC,” Amy Lannom Wilhite, the director of communications for the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, tells WIRED.
Roach is not named counsel on any of the Supreme Court cases. Mortara did not respond to questions about how many lawyers have worked for or done work for Lawfair and what Roach was working on at the firm after he joined, according to his online résumé, in 2020—the same year the firm was founded.
Update: 9/10/2024, 3:24 pm EST: This story has been updated to reflect comment Christopher Roach gave WIRED after publication.
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