A little-known figure from the final days of President-elect Donald Trump’s first term notched a series of high-profile legal wins over the last year, setting the stage for the new administration to implement its deregulatory agenda.
Over the last month, corporate interest groups won victories striking down the Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality rules, the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on non-compete agreements, and a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that would have required some cryptocurrency traders to register as securities dealers.
In each case, the victorious parties were represented by Jeffrey Wall, who served as acting Solicitor General for the last six months of the first Trump administration and cycled back to the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.
As inauguration day approaches, Trump and his various cabinet picks have vowed to rein in what they see as overreach from the Biden-era regulatory state, with the FTC, FCC, and SEC some of their main targets.
And though he doesn’t work for Trump anymore, Wall’s litigation wins made the new administration’s goals much easier to achieve.
Like several high-profile figures in Trumpworld—from Fox News host Laura Ingraham to John Eastman, the architect of Trump’s failed 2020 election denial plot—Wall got his start clerking for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas before climbing the ranks through private practice and the Department of Justice under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
He eventually landed in the Trump administration, serving as acting Solicitor General for six months in 2017 and then again after his boss Noel Francisco stepped down in July 2020 (Wall was never confirmed by the Senate). The role made him Trump’s primary litigator for any cases argued at the Supreme Court.
Wall was among the several Justice Department officials who rebuffed requests from Trump’s inner circle to challenge the president’s electoral loss, but he stayed on through the end of the administration even after Attorney General William Barr resigned.
The low-profile attorney went right back to fighting conservative legal battles in federal court, rejoining Sullivan & Cromwell within weeks of Trump’s departure from the White House in 2021.
Experts say it’s not uncommon for an administration’s top lawyers to return to private practice.
“It seems pretty typical of the Trump administration that those appointees would go on to do this kind of work that Wall’s involvement in these cases exemplifies,” said Andrea Beaty, a researcher at the Revolving Door Project.
Wall’s situation is unique, however, because Trump secured a non-consecutive presidential term for the first time since the 19th century.
In the interim, Wall clinched a string of decisions that will make Trump’s life much easier as he returns to the Oval Office.
The first major win came last August when Wall represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and three other plaintiffs, who joined a tax consultant to challenge the FTC’s rule banning non-compete clauses in employment contracts.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas—a favorite venue for MAGA legal causes—deemed the ban unlawful.
The rule was broadly popular, with an Ipsos poll from last spring showing 59% of Americans opposed non-competes. But some Republican policymakers and commentators, including commissioners at the FTC, were troubled by a national ban, which they saw as an overreach of the commission’s authority and an impediment to free-market contracts.
“This is not about non-compete agreements,” Wall said in a Georgetown Law School Federalist Society debate last year. “If the FTC can take a business practice that has been permissible for two centuries and that is okay under virtually every state’s law, and they can declare that it is an ‘unfair method of competition,’ they can do that for anything else.”
Among the two dissenters when the FTC approved the rule was Andrew Ferguson, Chair Lina Khan’s replacement, whose pitch to be Trump’s chairman was a cornucopia of MAGA buzzwords about wokeness, censorship, and the “anti-business” left. Last year, he called the non-compete rule “the most extraordinary assertion of authority in the Commission’s history.”
Wall's work to nullify the ban after rotating out of government will allow Ferguson and Trump’s FTC to bury the measure, said employment attorney Greg Care.
“I think the first most likely scenario would be for the FTC to pull the plug on the appeals that they are currently pursuing in order to try to resuscitate the non-compete rule,” Care said, adding that the commission could also repeal the rule entirely.
Wall secured another win for the deregulatory crowd just after the election in November. Arguing on behalf of the Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas and the Blockchain Association, the attorney fought an SEC rule expanding the definition of securities “dealers.”
The regulation would have required some crypto market participants to register under the Securities Exchange Act. It also would have impacted hedge funds, high-frequency traders, and other actors unrelated to crypto, which SEC chair Gary Gensler saw as “de facto market makers.”
Gensler said in a statement last year that leaving these firms unregistered would protect investors and offer greater transparency in markets.
The decentralized finance world was particularly excited about the decision, which again came from Texas’ most conservative federal court.
“HUGE VICTORY FOR CRYPTO OVER THE SEC,” wrote Blockchain Association board member Bill Hughes, who previously served in the Justice Department under Trump.
Crypto bros over on Reddit also cheered the otherwise obscure ruling.
“Gensler out. BTC almost at 100,000. Now this,” one user wrote. “I am literally shaking from all these wins today.”
Trump has promised a more crypto-friendly administration. The present-elect named regulatory hawk and crypto advocate Paul Atkins as Gensler’s replacement, while former PayPal COO David Sacks rode a wave of conservative internet stardom to become the White House’s first AI and crypto czar.
With the SEC’s expanded dealer rule vacated, Atkins and Sacks will have one less regulatory obstacle to worry about.
Wall’s most recent legal victory may be his most important yet. Earlier this month, a federal appeals court struck down the FCC’s proposed net neutrality rules, a decision that experts say will clear the way for internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon to give pricing and data speed preference to particular apps and sites.
“As a customer, what that's going to mean is I am going to experience accessing some apps, some sites, some services as really seamless,” said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But on the flip side, other sites, services, apps that can't afford to pay those extra premiums, it'll be clunkier to get to them.”
Trump’s pick for FCC chair, Brendan Carr, is a net-neutrality skeptic and championed “a market-friendly regulatory environment that fosters innovation and competition” in Project 2025’s FCC section, which he authored.
Noting that most consumers have no more than two choices for broadband, McSheary pushed back on the common argument that competition alone could keep prices fair for different content providers.
After Wall delivered the American telecom industry its long-awaited victory, Carr cheered the ruling and promised further rollbacks of Biden-era regulations.
“An appellate court just struck down President Biden’s partisan plan to expand government control of the Internet,” the commissioner wrote on X. “While the work to unwind the Biden Admin’s regulatory overreach will continue, this is a good win.”
Wall did not respond to requests for comment about his personal beliefs on the Biden administration’s aggressive approach to regulatory rulemaking or any relationship he may have with the incoming Trump administration.
On the eve of the second Trump administration, we do know that he won’t be returning to his former post, as Trump nominated D. John Sauer for solicitor general.
A dyed-in-the-wool Trump loyalist, Sauer represented the president-elect in his successful and wildly controversial argument to the Supreme Court that presidents should be immune from criminal prosecution.
Regardless of Wall’s next move, though, his successes in court have already made life easier for Trump as he moves to reshape the regulatory state.
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