President Donald Trump is nominating Matthew Schwartz, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who represents him in court, to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Schwartz is working on Trump’s appeal of his New York state conviction for concealing a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump announced the nomination in a social media post Friday, saying Schwartz had “fought hard against Lawfare and Government Overreach,” but did not mention his own case.
Schwartz is also part of the legal team trying to move the underlying criminal case from New York state court to federal. There, Trump could argue that he is immune from charges under a 2024 Supreme Court ruling that established immunity for presidential acts. U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein heard arguments in the case in February and did not issue a ruling.
Schwartz was also named in Trump’s new appeal just this week as the president seeks to overturn a judge’s finding that he is responsible for inflating the value of his properties.
This is the latest instance in which Trump has turned to his own legal team to fill the federal courts. He asked his former personal attorneys who worked on the hush case, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, for the top roles of doj. He later appointed Bove to the Third Circuit. Blanche is now the acting Attorney General.
Trump has since nominated to the Eighth Circuit his personal attorney, Justin Smith, who is representing Trump at the Supreme Court in an effort to overturn a sexual abuse and defamation conviction in a civil suit by writer E. Jean Carroll.
Schwartz’s other clients include Tesla Inc., Barclays and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 2003.
If confirmed, Schwartz will be Trump’s sixth nominee to the New York-based federal appeals court.
Trump also announced this week that he will nominate former Ohio Attorney General Benjamin Flowers for the Sixth Circuit seat.
