You might have seen Mark Paoletta’s name in the news recently thanks to his role as acting chief legal officer of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which President Donald Trump is busy trying to dismantle. Paoletta is also somehow the general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget, a job he held in the first Trump administration. You’d think those would both be full-time gigs, but that’s just because you don’t understand government efficiency.
But Paoletta is so, so much more than just a lawyer willing to dismantle the government because Trump says so. He’s also a longtime scumbag most notable for his ceaseless support of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his wife, Ginni.
In his current job, Paoletta has been leading the effort to fire roughly 1,400 CFPB employees, leaving a skeleton crew of about 200 people. The National Treasury Employees Union sued to block the firings and won a preliminary injunction. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, said CFPB could fire employees who agency leaders “determined, after a particularized assessment, to be unnecessary to the performance of defendants’ statutory duties.”
Just three days later, agency leaders sent termination notices to more than 1,400 employees. An anonymous CFPB employee told the court that the Department of Government Efficiency sent over Gavin Kliger, who is mostly notable for his enthusiasm for retweeting white supremacists like Nick Fuentes. Kliger, the declaration said, made employees handling the firings stay up for 36 hours straight and screamed at them when he thought they weren’t working fast enough.
What does all this have to do with Paoletta? The employees being screamed at by Kliger raised concerns that this did not look like a “particularized assessment.” They were told to calm down because Paoletta said agency leadership would assume the risk and that hitting the numbers was all that mattered.
Paoletta also filed a declaration stating that he had conducted a particularized assessment and went “line by line through each competitive area” to figure out how many employees were needed to continue CFPB’s statutorily required duties. Yes, Paoletta is saying he reviewed the overall scope of the agency AND the files of 1,400 employees in three days, making a particularized assessment for each one.
It’s honestly not possible to overstate how angry these shenanigans made U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who wrote that there was reason to believe that “the defendants simply spent the days immediately following the Circuit’s relaxation of the Order dressing their RIF [reduction in force] in new clothes, and that they are thumbing their nose at both this Court and the Court of Appeals.” She’s ordered both Paoletta and Kliger to appear in court on Monday to testify about the reduction in force notices.
No one knows how Kliger will handle himself on the stand, but Paoletta will be just fine. That’s not simply because he’s an experienced attorney, but also because Paoletta is quite adept at justifying the worst behavior of powerful people, as he has essentially made a career out of that when it comes to the Thomases.
Paoletta’s devotion to Clarence Thomas stretches back to 1991when he played a role in Thomas’ confirmation hearing. In 2016, as the 25th anniversary of that confirmation approached, Paoletta oversaw a public relations campaign praising Thomas. For his efforts, he got a cool $300,000 from the Judicial Education Project, a group funded by Leonard Leothe billionaire conservative activist most responsible for the current wretched state of the federal courts.
That PR campaign led, years later, to a film about Thomas, with Paoletta co-editing a book of Thomas’ oh-so-inspiring words. Both the film and the book are called “Created Equal.” Ugh.
Paoletta has also been one of the staunchest defenders of Thomas’ incredible achievements in being showered with treats by billionaires. When ProPublica broke the news that Thomas had accepted fancy trips, private jet flights, and yacht excursions from Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow for two decades but had never bothered to disclose them as required, Paoletta immediately stepped up.
Paoletta wrote an article for the National Review defending Thomas, explaining that Thomas totally did follow financial disclosure rules, and also that ProPublica reporting on Thomas’ historic level of corruption was part of a left-wing plot to destroy the Supreme Court. After it came to light that Crow had also paid private school tuition for Thomas’ nephew, Paoletta made sure to defend that as well, saying that since Crow paid the money to the school directly, it wasn’t a gift Thomas had to report.
Paoletta tends to omit the fact that he was already well aware of Crow’s generosity to Thomas. Remember the weird photo-realistic painting depicting Clarence Thomas hanging out with all the Federalist Society lawyers and Harlan Crow at Crow’s fancy private resort? Paoletta is in the middle of that picture, looking rapturously at Thomas. Paoletta also accompanied Crow and the Thomases on an eight-day trip around Indonesia on Crow’s yacht in 2019.
Ginni Thomas also has Paoletta in her corner. He served as her personal attorney after her penchant for texting about how Trump won the 2020 election drew the attention of the House Jan. 6 committee. Paoletta initially argued that there was no reason for her to appear before the committee unless it gave him a “better justification.”
Yes, why would it be at all relevant to talk to the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice who was at Trump’s rally on Jan. 6 before his supporters stormed the Capitol, texted with Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows about voter fraud and how to keep Trump in office, and emailed 29 Arizona state lawmakers about how they should name electors for Trump even though Biden won the state?
Paoletta defended all of this as “minimal and mainstream.” Ginni Thomas eventually agreed to appear before the Jan. 6 committee, at which point she continued to insist that the election was stolen. So minimal and mainstream!
Paoletta also swooped in to protect her after it became clear that Clarence Thomas isn’t alone in his love of shady money. In 2023, the Washington Post reported that a group Ginni Thomas ran, Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty (what does that even mean??) got $600,000 in anonymous donations funneled through a conservative think tank. Paoletta came to her rescue with a statement about how she had “complied with all reporting and disclosure requirements.”
Paoletta will never be as notorious as an Elon Musk or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a scumbag. He’s just a less flashy, more professional one. It takes all sorts to wreck democracy, and Paoletta is here for it.
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