Nearly eight years ago, convinced that she’d been treated unfairly, Jessica Denson sued Donald Trump’s campaign for workplace harassment.

Then she discovered the lengths Trump’s attorneys would go to hit back — and their unwillingness to stop.

Immediately, the campaign filed a counterclaim for $1.5 million. It won a $52,229 judgment, and the campaign froze her bank account and almost forced her into bankruptcy.

She found it humiliating when the campaign lawyers branded her a “judgment debtor” in a subpoena. They monitored her Twitter account, which had 32 followers, and submitted hundreds of pages of printouts to a judge. They even deposed her mother, grilling her about the family’s religious practices.

The judgment was ultimately thrown out by a judge, but her legal fight continues.

The process has been “unbearable,” Denson said, describing the unrelenting pressure she felt from Trump campaign attorneys. “This had become my life. I had no income and had this lien against me. It crippled my ability to work.”

The legal resources deployed to try to crush Denson’s case are not unusual. At least four women of color involved in the 2016 operation have been embroiled in legal fights with the campaign over workplace harassment, discrimination or violations of nondisclosure agreements. They have been subjected to scorched-earth tactics. For years, the Trump campaign has persisted, despite losing consistently, in at least some cases after it was clear that its efforts had damaged the women.

Trump was regularly updated on the women’s cases, according to two people familiar with the matters. In one, he wanted to escalate the dispute by filing a federal defamation lawsuit against the former employee, but his lawyers persuaded him it was best handled through confidential arbitration. Campaign lawyers urged him to settle the ongoing “legacy lawsuits” from 2016 before the 2020 election, but he declined.

Now as Trump engages in another presidential run, a judge’s order in one of those cases may force into public view the new details about staffers who lodged similar accusations. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the campaign to produce by May 31 a list of all discrimination and harassment complaints made during Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential runs, allegations that the campaign initially tried to keep confidential through rigorously enforced NDAs. Last year, a federal judge freed 422 employees of the 2016 campaign from confidentiality agreements in a class-action lawsuit brought by Denson, a major crack in the campaign’s strategy.

As the media has chronicled, Trump is a well-known bully. He has belittled and sought to dominate political rivals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former allies like Bill Barr, who was his attorney general. Trump and his surrogates have appeared to relish hounding or humiliating women who have verbally crossed him, including media and Hollywood stars and a long list of accusers who have complained over the years about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct. (He has denied all of the allegations.)

But ProPublica found that Trump’s campaign used similar bullying tactics against its own workers. These fights have been waged out of the public eye against women with few resources to stand up against the campaign’s battery of lawyers, paid from a seemingly bottomless trove of campaign money.

The campaign is “still litigating these ridiculous cases that should have been settled” long ago, said campaign finance authority Brett Kappel of Harmon Curran, who has been tracking Trump’s civil and criminal cases. Trump’s strategy is the same one he’s used in other lawsuits: “Drag it out and make it as painful and expensive as possible for the opponent, and maybe they’ll go away,” he said.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Spokesperson Steven Cheung in an emailed statement said one of the cases filed by a former campaign worker was “an absurd and fake story.”

Supporters are giving him money earned with “blood, sweat and tears,” Denson said. “And it is being turned around to terrorize people.”

As is being revealed now in the Stormy Daniels case, Trump’s chaotic 2016 campaign was governed by one overriding public relations strategy: Lock down any whiff of scandal that could be unflattering or compromising to the candidate.

Trump’s campaign used a trio of tools, borrowed largely from the Trump Organization, to ensure that. Allegations were met with swift denials. Employees were bound to silence by onerous NDAs that imposed a lifetime ban on disparaging Trump, his extended family or any of his companies. And the campaign’s lawyers brought in a phalanx of Trump-savvy outside lawyers prepared to crush.

How much the campaign has poured into such efforts is unclear, but it is likely millions, according to spending reports. Trump’s bills for all his many legal challenges — workplace harassment claims aren’t broken out — have topped $100 million.

Trump’s use of donor money to fight lawsuits against the campaign is legal, but experts say he has pushed the limits of laws that forbid using campaign contributions for legal matters that have nothing to do with running for office.

The campaign faced its first-known discrimination complaint in January 2016 when Iowa field organizer Elizabeth Davidson filed a case with a local civil rights agency claiming she had been underpaid because she was a woman. The law student had been fired and accused of violating her NDA by making “disparaging comments” to the press, according to the complaint. Davidson dropped her case without explanation in 2018. She did not return phone calls.

The Trump campaign brought out heavy artillery to try to discredit another female employee who filed a federal lawsuit in February 2019. Alva Johnson, a field operations director from Alabama, alleged pay disparities and a hostile workplace in 2016, but her most explosive allegation was that Trump engaged in “sexually predatory conduct” by kissing her without permission during a Florida campaign event.

To handle her case, the campaign hired attorney Charles Harder, best known for winning a privacy case in 2016 that financially destroyed the gossip website Gawker. Harder’s firm was paid $4.3 million for legal work on a number of campaign cases between 2018 and 2021, according to spending reports. Trump was then in the White House, and spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Johnson’s accusation “absurd.”

Harder produced a video filmed by an unnamed supporter. It showed Trump kissing Johnson near her mouth as he approached her for the first time in a reception line. Harder argued the video showed the kiss was not forced; Johnson’s lawyers argued it proved the kiss was real and unwelcome.

A Trump-appointed judge threw out Johnson’s case in 2019, calling the kissing allegation a political attack, and gave her a chance to refile a complaint focused only on alleged pay disparities. She said recently in an interview she chose not to do so, largely because she was frightened for herself and her family as Trump supporters rallied to the president’s defense.

“I definitely heard about every possible way I could die,” she said. “We lived in a cul-de-sac, and they would just drive around with their Trump flags.”

Harder subpoenaed Johnson’s bank statements, extensive news media contacts and communications with potential employers. At one point, Johnson said, Harder offered to withdraw the complaint if she would apologize to Trump and leave the NDA in place. She refused. At another point, Trump wanted to countersue her for defamation, but his lawyers talked him out of it, according to two people.

In response to questions, Harder said his legal tactics were “100% permissible discovery in an employment case” and her attorneys did not object. “It’s called litigation, and it’s part of the legal process,” he said.

Johnson’s arbitration case dragged on long after Harder’s firm withdrew. The campaign brought in new outside lawyers, but by then, judges in Denson’s New York case had found the NDA invalid and other courts seemed likely to follow. If Johnson won, Trump’s NDA said the losing party must pay legal fees.

In August 2022, the arbitrator found Johnson’s NDA unenforceable and ordered the campaign to pay her lawyers $303,285. She said she personally received no money but “won the ability to speak.”

In a statement, Cheung, the spokesperson for Trump’s 2024 campaign, called Johnson’s account “an absurd and fake story that has previously been debunked and contradicted by multiple, highly credible eyewitness accounts.”

The campaign also relied on Harder in an NDA case it brought against former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman, a Black former contestant on “The Apprentice” who wrote a 2018 tell-all book describing Trump as a racist. Trump smeared her on Twitter as a “low life.” Harder said he withdrew from the case before its conclusion.

Newman had signed an NDA in 2016 when she joined the campaign, and its lawyers demanded $1.5 million for violating the secrecy agreement. The case plodded along until 2021, when an arbitration judge ruled in Newman’s favor and found Trump’s NDA too vague to enforce. He ordered the campaign to pay $1.3 million to Newman’s lawyers. “The bully has met his match,” Newman declared at the time. She could not be reached for comment.

A discrimination case pending in a Manhattan court, however, might force the culture of Trump’s previous campaigns and their suppression efforts into the light.

Arlene “AJ” Delgado sued the 2016 campaign and three senior officials for discrimination after she became pregnant by her supervisor, Jason Miller, then the campaign’s chief spokesperson.

Trump had called Delgado a rising star when she went on the campaign trail as one of his Hispanic surrogates, and she expected an administration job. But she claimed that when she confronted Miller about her pregnancy, he told her Trump could not afford to have her “waddling around the White House pregnant.” Other senior officials shut her out of work discussions until her transition job ended with Trump’s inauguration, she claimed.

Ten days after Delgado delivered her baby, the Trump campaign filed a $1.5 million-claim against her for NDA violations. Delgado’s main offense, according to the campaign, was a series of angry tweets about Miller and Trump’s decision to promote him to White House communications director. The attorney on the case, Lawrence Rosen, who left LaRocca Hornik Rosen & Greenberg, as it was then known, late last year, and his former partners did not return calls or emails.

Miller did not respond to repeated attempts to seek comment.

The firm, now named LaRocca, Hornik, Greenberg, Kittredge, Carlin & McPartland, leases space in a Trump office building, and it has long been a favored legal vendor for the Trump campaign. It’s been paid at least $2.8 million since 2016 by the Trump campaign and its affiliated PAC, Make America Great Again, according to campaign reports. Rosen was described on the firm’s website as a “bulldog” litigator, and he recently surfaced in testimony from Trump fixer Michael Cohen as a lawyer involved in his effort to silence Daniels, a porn star.

Delgado, a Harvard Law School graduate, claims in the lawsuit filed in December 2019 that the campaign deprived her of a job and hurt her other employment prospects. Squaring off against campaign lawyers, she serves as her own attorney and has raised money for legal expenses, including taking depositions from top former White House officials, through GoFundMe.

Delgado recently accused the campaign of withholding information about its handling of harassment and discrimination cases. A LaRocca partner said in a court filing the campaign has disclosed all of the information it has on women’s complaints.

The judge ordered the campaign to produce a full list of cases by May 31. (It’s unclear whether there are any cases that have not emerged yet into public view.)

The LaRocca firm abruptly withdrew from the case, citing “irreparable differences” with the campaign, after five years pursuing Delgado in court.

As for former 2016 campaign staffer Denson, now an actress currently hosting a podcast, she continues to pursue her personal discrimination and retaliation suit, saying she wants her persistence to inspire others.

The federal judge’s decision in October 2023 to void NDAs for all 2016 employees, vendors and volunteers was a blow to the campaign. The campaign agreed to pay $450,000 to Denson’s lawyers and to no longer pursue employees for NDA violations.

Denson said her problems began when she went to work for the campaign’s data division as a national phone bank administrator, one of a dozen employees who reported to director Camilo Sandoval. She had no experience and believed she and another woman, a model, were hired simply because of their looks.

She claimed that Sandoval, who later worked in several high-ranking Trump administration jobs, made inappropriate comments and assigned end-of-day tasks to make her stay late. In one private meeting, she said, he reclined on a sofa. In a deposition, Sandoval denied many of Denson’s charges. He did not respond to calls or email.

Denson’s work on a Spanish-language project caught the attention of Steve Bannon, then the campaign’s CEO, who moved her to work on Hispanic outreach and raised her pay by $3,000 a month, her complaint said. Sandoval reacted angrily to the transfer and scolded her immediate boss for letting his “sheep wander.” He told her, “I hired you and I can also fire you,” she alleged.

Denson introduced emails Sandoval sent to senior officials describing her as a security risk who should be reported to the police and the Secret Service. He suggested she was stealing documents and may have had a role in mailing Trump’s 1995 personal tax return to a reporter at The New York Times, court records show. She claimed he hacked into her personal laptop while she was traveling. In a deposition, he denied accessing her personal information.

Based on Bannon’s encouraging emails about her performance, Denson thought she would be hired for Trump’s transition. But documents showed the campaign’s human resources director telling others, “Jessica is NOT ever to be hired onto transition, inaugural or brought to DC!” An email from Sandoval to senior official Stephen Miller said, “This bitch is out of control.”

She filed a lawsuit in New York state court in November 2017 claiming emotional distress as a result of “pervasive slander,” discrimination and harassment. A month later, Rosen pounced. On Christmas Eve, Denson got papers demanding that she face arbitration for violating her NDA by filing the suit. The campaign sought $1.5 million in damages.

Denson declined to go to arbitration, arguing that her right to a safe workplace was unrelated to the NDA, and the campaign won the judgment for legal fees by default. Rosen had her bank account frozen and went after $1,200 she had raised through GoFundMe.

“This is how cruel and scorched earth they were,” she said in a recent interview.

Denson said in her deposition that Trump campaign lawyers grilled her aggressively about her whereabouts. “Their obsession with my location was very frightening,” she said. “The fear has lived with me ever since.”

She felt further traumatized when the campaign demanded to see mental health and medical records. She was upset when they suggested to her during her deposition that her emotional damage was not extreme.

Denson’s cases followed a circuitous path, and at first she served as her own lawyer because she had no money to pay attorney fees. She remembered crying inconsolably late one night, fearing her situation was hopeless, then waking up to learn a judge had sided with her and had thrown out the judgment in the campaign’s favor as unfair.

In March 2021, a federal judge declared her individual NDA invalid under New York state contract law and said the campaign had used NDAs repeatedly to “suppress free speech.” Denson and her legal team moved forward to extend her victory to all 2016 staffers.

Legal experts say the class-action victory established a precedent that should deter future campaigns from trying to quash employees’ free-speech rights.

Denson and other women fighting the campaign have been struck by Trump’s repeated assertions in his own cases that his right to speak freely has been violated.

“I came to the campaign as someone who cared deeply about human rights, First Amendment, individual liberty; I thought I was working on a campaign that supported those values,” Denson said. “Then I saw the opposite of what this country stands for, going after perceived critics and trying to destroy them.”

Eva Bonilla grows furious when she thinks about how Latino voters are treated by the Republican power structure in Texas. At 74, the small business owner watched the GOP Legislature pass a series of measures like a voter ID law that she felt would make it harder for Latinos to cast ballots or run for public office.

Two years ago, serving as the leader of a Hispanic women’s group in Fort Worth, she decided to strike back. The Republican Legislature had just pushed through new election maps that carved up Latino communities and made it even harder for them to elect candidates of their choice. So Bonilla joined other minority voters as plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit alleging intentional discrimination in the 2021 redistricting plan.

“I wanted to see the right thing done, and this is just not right,” she said.

Then Bonilla waited.

In 2022, an election came and went with districts based on the challenged maps. It has now achieved a dubious distinction: Of the 87 lawsuits filed over the 2021 congressional and legislative redistricting plans nationwide, it has dragged on the longest without having held a trial. As another election looms, a trial date has not even been set.

The reason? Republican leaders asserted their rights to block the most routine give-and-take of lawsuits, resisting handing over documents, providing discovery or submitting to depositions — in effect squashing Bonilla’s efforts to uncover how the 2021 maps were drawn. The lawmakers have done so by the rigorous use of two forms of privilege: the better known attorney-client privilege and what is known as legislative privilege, which allows elected members of state legislatures to deliberate in private.

As the Texas case drags on, legislatures across the country are making new and expansive claims of privilege to keep electoral maps in place and prevent the public from finding out how they made their decisions and why.

Texas lawmakers did not stumble upon these tactics on their own. A national GOP redistricting group helped train Republican lawmakers in Texas on how to approach lawsuits and raised money to pay legal costs. The lawmakers also passed a new law to further protect their deliberations. In addition, they put an outside political operative on the state’s payroll so that the legislative privilege could shield his activities. Finally, they relied on GOP map-drawers who worked for law firms, which allowed lawmakers to assert that the maps were “legal advice.”

Throughout, the Texas lawmakers have contended they did not discriminate against Latino voters.

In Louisiana, North Dakota and elsewhere, Republicans have resisted challenges to their maps by asserting privilege. In Washington, Democrats have done the same. Legal experts say the expanding use of privilege robs plaintiffs of key insights. To succeed in court, plaintiffs in many cases have to show legislators intended to discriminate. Without access, explained Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, it becomes “very difficult to prove intent even where it was actually present.”

The concept of legislative privilege is protected under the U.S. Constitution’s speech and debate clause, and 43 states have embedded it in their constitutions. Originally intended to protect legislators from criminal or civil claims for things they said on the floor, it has come to encompass lawmakers’ work-related communications. In theory, affording such protection allowed for frank conversations.

But in the past, people who wanted to scrutinize a legislature’s activities had another, if narrower, way to find out what was going on: They could file open records requests to get access to interactions lawmakers had with outside third parties, such as consultants or political operatives. In Texas and elsewhere, Republicans have succeeded in shielding even these once-public interactions.

Conservative judges in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers several states including Texas, and the 8th Circuit, which covers the Dakotas, have recently sided with state legislatures that have used expanded privilege claims to prevent public review. Recently, Arizona Republicans appealed to the 9th Circuit to shield their deliberations.

Partisan battles have long been a staple of redistricting, which happens every 10 years. But as more states craft their new maps out of public sight, the fights are ending up in drawn-out court cases, with enormous consequences for voters. The lawsuits are taking so long to resolve that six states conducted their 2022 elections under maps that had been ruled illegal by lower courts, according to a recent analysis by Democracy Docket, a progressive website that tracks redistricting cases. They await resolution. Lawsuits challenging maps in seven other states were still awaiting court action when the elections took place.

The Texas GOP undertook its mapmaking effort as the state was undergoing a significant demographic shift. Latinos now slightly outnumber non-Hispanic white people in the state, and they and other minorities account for almost all population growth in the last decade, according to census data. Many of these new residents will likely vote for the Democratic Party. Through aggressive redistricting, however, Republicans have been able to maintain control of the Legislature, all major statewide offices and the state’s congressional delegation. And they grabbed one of the two new seats in Congress gained through the population increases.

“Elections can’t really be unwound. You can’t go back and change the composition of the Texas Legislature from 2022,” said Yurij Rudensky, senior counsel with the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan legal institute. The center represents a separate group of minority plaintiffs who are challenging the state’s maps. The Justice Department has joined the plaintiffs. “So using discriminatory districts cuts to the heart of our democracy.”

To reconstruct how Texas Republicans stalled the legal fight over their redrawn districts, ProPublica used federal court records in six states as well as interviews with experts, voters and former state officials. Combined they provide the fullest account yet of how state lawmakers hobbled the opposition and hidden their activities.

Keith Gaddie, a former bipartisan litigation consultant, said that in his experience, lawmakers keep their methods secret when they are aggressively gaming the process for political gain. “The more egregious the gerrymander, the less information can be made available about the process,” he said. “It’s a nasty, nasty business.”

The Plan

Redistricting in Texas was two years away when leaders of the Virginia-based National Republican Redistricting Trust flew into Houston for a poolside briefing for GOP supporters.

Established in 2017 to counter a similar Democratic Party redistricting operation, the NRRT and its nonprofit affiliate, Fair Lines America, had many Texas ties. Senior leadership included powerful Texan Karl Rove, a former White House official and longtime consultant to Texas governors.

At the closed event in 2019 in a Houston suburb, Texas GOP Chairman James Dickey mingled with party loyalists to discuss the two or three new seats they should get in Congress as the state’s population boomed, according to social media accounts and interviews. A young supporter took selfies with Washington influencers like James “Trey” Trainor, a Texas lawyer whose nomination by President Donald Trump to the Federal Election Commission was being blocked by Democrats because of his criticisms of campaign finance laws. On Instagram, the supporter described it as a helpful session on the “threats and opportunities redistricting presents.”

The NRRT’s executive director is Adam Kincaid, a former Republican National Committee strategist. Kincaid had become the go-to conservative voice on redistricting within the party. Soon, he would take a hands-on role in drawing Texas’ congressional map. Kincaid declined to comment on his work in Texas “due to ongoing litigation.”

On a party podcast, Kincaid had pushed Republicans to counter what he described as the Democrat’s plan to “sue till it’s blue.” The NRRT distributed talking points asserting that “Democrats are sitting back counting the cash they plan to use on their trial lawyers to fund their strategy of endless litigation,” according to a document secured by the watchdog American Oversight.

In the podcast, Kincaid said the NRRT, which does not have to disclose its donors, would send resources to states facing challenges. Separately, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas promoted a super PAC that raised money to hire redistricting experts and legal counsel and brought in $500,000 in a single day.

Texas had been mired in voting rights litigation for almost a decade. Groups representing Latino and Black voters had sued after the 2010 census too, making similar allegations to today. Then, a district court judicial panel rejected the state’s map, ruling that large portions of it were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders and ordering maps to be redrawn. Republicans tried to assert legislative privilege over internal emails, but judges rejected the arguments and ordered the documents released.

Emails exposed GOP staffers plotting about how to draw maps to maximize Republican influence in Latino areas, or as one staffer put it: creating “Optimal Hispanic Republican Voting Strength.”

A state lawyer dismissed their plan in Spanish, “No Bueno,” slang for “No Good.” He warned them not to create a paper trail. The court found discriminatory intent.

The state appealed. Ultimately, the Supreme Court in 2018 reversed the lower court and sided with the Republicans in a 5-4 ruling.

Having been embarrassed after 2010, GOP leaders promised transparency this time around. Instead, they took the opposite tack, said Glenn Smith, an author and longtime Houston reporter and Democratic consultant: “Hide as much as possible.”

A leader in the buildup to the 2021 redistricting was Republican state Rep. Phil King, a lawyer who has championed religious liberty and Second Amendment issues. King chaired the House Redistricting Committee and set up a tutorial for members in 2019 featuring Ryan Bangert, a hardliner who was appointed by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. It was obvious, said one attendee, that King was “preemptively trying to make sure members covered their tracks.” King’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In his presentation, Bangert raised what he called “caution flags,” according to a tape of the meeting. While judges had differing interpretations of privilege, it was generally waived if information was shared with outside third parties like lobbyists. “Be very careful,” he said, of tweets or barroom conversations. Bangert now advises a conservative legal group. His spokesperson said that he had no further redistricting involvement.

King was the ideal person to lead the fight. He had star billing in 2019 at two sessions of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group of state lawmakers, lobbyists and executives that works to draft and spread conservative legislation. King, a national board member of the council, spoke on a panel that delivered a primer on redistricting challenges. Drawing maps favorable to the GOP while preserving minority rights was tricky, party leaders said at the sessions.

GOP strategist Cleta Mitchell, who later took a lead role in Trump’s 2020 election denial effort, worked with the council’s redistricting committee. She moderated King’s panel at the annual convention, telling the audience sarcastically that it would teach them “how to gerrymander.” Slate, which posted leaked audio, said the speakers encouraged “trashing potential evidence.”

The legislators did not want to rely solely on their own discretion, however. In May 2019, a Republican House member from Fort Worth used a routine housekeeping bill to mount a sweeping assault on open records. He slipped a provision into the bill that closed off public access to internal redistricting records. It passed before transparency advocates noticed.

The bill shielded lawmakers’ communications with staff, even interns, as well as outside contractors who might normally be considered third parties. Other legislatures have adopted similar measures. Florida has exempted redistricting documents from its Sunshine Law since 1993, and North Carolina’s Republican-led Legislature recently buried a similar exemption in its 625-page budget bill. The Democratic-led Legislature in Washington is under a court challenge for using a loophole in the state constitution to exclude lawmakers from open records requests related to redistricting.

In addition to passing the law, Texas Republicans assembled legal heavy hitters who, in turn, hired subcontractors who could work behind attorney-client privilege. The House paid more than $1 million to Butler Snow LLP, which hired a Virginia-based demographer to draw maps for the state House of Representatives. (The legal contracts were obtained by American Oversight through an open records request sent before the law was passed.)

Then, for the national congressional seats, 22 GOP members of the Texas Legislature hired Chris Gober, former general counsel for the state Republican Party. It’s not unusual for states or members to retain outside counsel. But what Gober then did was hire the NRRT, an outside party, paying the group a mere $5,000. That secured Kincaid’s map-drawing services, according to Gober’s deposition. He said Kincaid “had the mouse” on the computer drawing congressional maps.

Gober said he is not proficient with redistricting software and hires subcontractors to work under his direction. “That arrangement — and our assertion of attorney-client privilege — is not any different than the other circumstances where our firm hires subcontractors,” he said.

In the Texas case, NRRT legal counsel Jason Torchinsky argued that Kincaid should not have to give a deposition because it would “deter full and honest discussions” between NRRT and partners. After a year of wrangling, a judge ordered Kincaid to answer questions and a deposition is scheduled for early November.

Torchinsky himself has become a key figure in helping Republicans with redistricting. In 2022, he helped devise a new congressional map for the office of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The governor’s plan, which faces a federal lawsuit, reduced the voting power of Black residents. A state judge has since ordered the map redrawn. Torchinsky did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Working From Inside

While Kincaid focused on drawing a map for the state’s congressional seats, GOP map-drawer Adam Foltz arrived from Wisconsin in 2021 to assist the local effort. By then, Republican state Rep. Todd Hunter had succeeded King as House redistricting chairman. Hunter had a checkered history in redistricting; judges in 2011 had criticized him for drawing maps that undermined Latinos, according to The Texas Tribune. Hunter gave Foltz a $120,000-a-year state job, the Tribune reported, and he enjoyed such high-level access that Democrats noticed his car parked in a special driveway for members. Foltz, whose work also fell under the umbrella of privilege, drew a state salary even after map drawing concluded, and he recently got a $6,000 cost-of-living increase.

Foltz had a similar arrangement in Wisconsin, a state lawyers often cite as a poster child for improper government secrecy and prolonged litigation in its 2010 redistricting cycle. Working from a private law firm, Foltz drew maps that later were thrown out, according to local press reports. Foltz remained in a $50,000-a-year state job during litigation. He later gave testimony that a judicial panel called “almost laughable.” Foltz declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. Hunter’s office did not respond.

Foltz’s deposition in the Texas case remains sealed by order of the court. He is still asserting legislative privilege to try to prevent giving access to his mapping work to the Justice Department, which joined the plaintiffs who are challenging the maps.

Consequences

The fight carried over to the Texas Senate as well. Republican-led redistricting helped end the Senate tenure of Beverly Powell, a Democrat. She said she knew she had a target on her back from the time she was elected, unseating a Tea Party Republican in 2018.

Powell’s Senate District 10 in Tarrant County, an unpredictable swing district in recent years, was one of several seats Republicans wanted to reclaim to consolidate their power.

She expected a bad result when the Republican chair of the Senate Redistricting Committee, Joan Huffman, secluded herself to draw a new Senate map. When Powell was finally called in to view it, what she saw outraged her. Her district’s minority communities had been split up, diluting their voting strength, while largely white rural counties had been added.

“I know exactly what you are trying to do,” Powell said she told Huffman. She dashed off a warning to other senators that Huffman’s plan was discriminatory.

Huffman insisted her map was “race-blind.” Her plan sailed through, with a notable dissent from former redistricting chair Sen. Kel Seliger, a Republican then feuding with some fellow Republicans. The Amarillo senator later testified that Huffman’s map “violated the Voting Rights Act.”

Powell tried unsuccessfully to convince a court to delay the 2022 primary election. She dropped out of the race for reelection, and the powerful House veteran King took her seat.

Powell’s complaint about the district is now part of LULAC v. Abbott, the redistricting case now awaiting trial. Her case stands out because “she has much more information about what happened than any of the rest of us do,” said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Republicans have asserted privilege in the Senate mapping fight as well. Overall for all the mapping, their claims cover about two-thirds of the documents the Justice Department wants, including drafts of maps, emails and calendars that reflect protected “thoughts, opinions and mental impressions,” documents show. The legislature has disputed that estimate.

The case stalled for a year while the 5th Circuit weighed privilege in another Texas case. Written by Trump appointee Judge Don R. Willett, its decision defended legislative privilege “even when constitutional rights are at stake.” The 8th Circuit also ruled in June in a North Dakota redistricting case that privilege “protects the functioning of the legislature.”

Judges in the redistricting case are weighing how these decisions impact 22 outstanding motions for documents and depositions.

For her part, Bonilla, the Fort Worth small business owner, says she’s given up hope. “The system has failed,” she said.

Democratic Rep. James Clyburn’s role in South Carolina’s 2022 redistricting has emerged as a central point of contention between Democrats and Republicans in a racial gerrymandering case to be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The case revolves around whether Republicans, who control the Legislature, illegally disenfranchised Black voters when they created new election maps or whether the process was simply partisan politics. A key question is whether the role that the powerful Black Democrat played in the process was enough to inoculate the entire effort.

At the beginning of the process in November 2021, a top Clyburn aide secretly delivered a one-page map to the Republicans. That was the starting point for a formal redistricting plan that went through numerous revisions before the Legislature approved it in 2022. The NAACP sued state Republicans, arguing that the plan discriminated against Black voters. A three-judge federal panel sided with the NAACP early this year and ruled that one congressional district in the plan, the 1st District, is an illegal racial gerrymander and must be redrawn before the next election. ProPublica detailed Clyburn’s involvement and was first to publish his map in a May 5 investigation.

In their legal filings, Republican leaders contend they did not take race into account when they redrew the districts. They say they complied with acceptable redistricting principles. And they contend that Clyburn’s recommendations played a key role in starting the process. If the lower court’s ruling is allowed to stand, they argue, it “would invite federal courts to micromanage political disputes in countless such districts across the country.”

In a recent filing in response, the congressman’s lawyers argue that Republicans are trying to blame Clyburn, a state civil rights leader, for an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander intentionally designed to dilute minority voting power.” He supports the NAACP case and asked the high court to affirm the federal judicial panel.

Clyburn’s redistricting involvement was “routine and circumscribed.” The draft map his aide gave to Senate Republican staffers was only a rough idea for how to draw his district, not a formal redistricting plan for the entire state, his lawyers argue.

The decision will help define a murky point of redistricting law: when a partisan gerrymander crosses the line to become an illegal racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court in 2019 held that it would not interfere in partisan map-drawing. But federal courts have overturned redistricting plans in which racial considerations played a predominant role.

The case is being closely watched by other Southern states facing redistricting challenges. Parties in a federal racial gerrymandering case in Tennessee, for example, have decided they will await the court’s South Carolina decision before beginning their own pretrial document discovery.

In June, the court surprised observers by rejecting Alabama’s redistricting as discriminatory, a ruling that may affect maps in several other states and give Democrats a shot at winning as many as six seats in the South in the 2024 elections.

In South Carolina, race and politics are inextricably linked, and the state has a long history of racial discrimination and violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Republican Party is predominantly white and controls the Legislature, major state offices and six of the seven congressional districts.

Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, South Carolina experienced an influx of people who were disproportionately white. The 1st District, a swing district, had too many people and the 6th District, which Clyburn has held since 1993, had too few.

The case revolves around the question of whether the 1st District was an illegal racial gerrymander. Republicans made it much safer for their party. As recently as 2018, a Democrat held the 1st District. It is now held by Nancy Mace, who ran as a moderate but recently has risen to prominence as one of eight Republicans who voted to depose Kevin McCarthy as U.S. House speaker. In 2022, she won by 14 percentage points.

Republicans made Mace’s district safer by taking Black neighborhoods out and putting some into the 6th District. The result was that Clyburn solidified his hold on the district as its population rapidly changed.

In doing so, they say they followed the outlines of Clyburn’s early map. It had suggested moving neighborhoods that are disproportionately Black into his district and out of the 1st District. It also recommended moving some heavily white neighborhoods into Mace’s district, strengthening the GOP’s hold. Republicans say that Clyburn suggested moving even more Black residents into his district than they eventually approved.

The 1st District ended up with a Black population of 17% in a state where the overall Black population is 26%.

In his brief to the court, Clyburn’s attorney, John Graubert, accused Republicans of trying to “blur the distinction” between the congressman’s rough recommendations and the final plan.

Graubert insisted that Clyburn’s involvement is legally irrelevant to a case that will decide whether the GOP-led Legislature “engaged in intentional racial discrimination.”

The Legislature’s case is being presented by William Wilkins, a former chief judge on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and John M. Gore of Jones Day, who served in the Trump administration as acting assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

The court is expected to decide by early next year if it will uphold the three-judge panel’s ruling in the case, known as Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.

Rick Hasen, a legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, said deciding the line between partisan and racial gerrymandering is a “recurring issue” for the court as both political parties bring cases alleging violations of the Equal Protection Clause.

“When the state says it’s about politics, and the plaintiffs argue that it’s about race, how are you supposed to disentangle those two things?” he said.