Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s top assistant leaves to help get conservative judges on the federal bench

AUSTIN — Jeff Mateer, the top lawyer working under Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is leaving government service to rejoin a prominent Plano-based conservative nonprofit law firm helping to nominate judges to federal courts.

The First Liberty Institute hired Mateer and Hannah Clayson Smith, an attorney at Schaerr Jaffe, to work on judicial selection and “defending religious liberty across America,” Executive General Counsel Hiram Sasser confirmed to The Dallas Morning News in a text message late Friday.

In the weeks before President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, The Wall Street Journal reported that First Liberty provided feedback to the president on his selections for the top court’s bench. First Liberty’s website counts nominating conservative judges to the federal bench among its top priorities.

Paxton hired Mateer away from First Liberty to be First Assistant Attorney General in 2016. He replaced now U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin. It’s unclear who will take place Mateer’s place under Paxton. Before joining Paxton’s agency, Mateer was well known for opposing LGBTQ rights and fighting for Christians who said their religious freedoms were being curtailed.

Trump nominated Mateer for a spot in Eastern District of Texas but the confirmation process was halted after it was reported he called transgender children “Satan’s spawn” and made other homophobic comments. In 2015, Mateer complained that states were banning so-called conversion therapy and said same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy, bestiality and “disgusting” forms of wedlock.

He referred to transgender children as “Satan’s spawn” and argued that it would be OK in some circumstances for judges to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

And in a July 2015 column published in The News, Mateer said the Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage “has trampled or corrupted virtually every tenet of the rule of law.” As an attorney for First Liberty, he defended East Texas cheerleaders whose high school prohibited them from displaying Bible verses on their signs at school sporting events and worked against the Plano ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Office of the Attorney General has seen two other high profile departures in the past month.

Nick Moutos, an assistant attorney general in the criminal prosecution unit, was forced to leave last month after a report detailed his history of questionable Twitter posts. Communications Director Marc Rylander, who was hired around the same time as Mateer, also left last month.