Richard Painter

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Painter served as law clerk to Judge John T. Noonan Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then worked at the law firms of Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and Finn Dixon & Herling in Stamford, Connecticut.

Painter was the Guy Raymond and Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law from 2002 to 2005 and the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration from 2005 to 2007. Upon leaving the White House, he returned to teaching, at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Painter has been a member of the American Law Institute since 2004. In March 2016 he wrote in The New York Times that if George W. Bush had had the opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice during his last two years in office, with a Democratic-majority Senate, Bush would have chosen Merrick Garland, who was ultimately nominated by Barack Obama on March 16, 2016, as a consensus nominee. William K. Kelley, who was deputy counsel to Bush from 2005 to 2007, disagreed that Bush might have nominated Garland under such circumstances.

In December 2016, Painter replaced David Brock as vice-chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). As of May 2017 he is the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.

In May 2017 Painter compared the Trump administration with Nixon's scandals, saying, "Nixon may have been a crook, but at least he was our crook. He wasn’t a Russian agent!" In 2018 he said, “We know there was collusion.” In early 2019 Painter told German newspaper Deutsche Welle that the indictment of Roger Stone was "evidence of collusion between high-ranking officials in the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks to obtain documents stolen by the Russians in the 2016 election."

In January 2017 CREW sued President Donald Trump for failing to sell off certain assets and place others in a blind trust. Painter said, "If Obama had tried that, we would have impeached him in two weeks." CREW alleged that certain foreign payments that Trump received violated the U.S. Constitution's emoluments clause. The case was dismissed by the district court, which found that the plaintiffs lacked standing; CREW's appeal is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Painter was a longtime Republican, saying in 2017: "I've been a Republican for 30 years. There's no way that I would want to see the Republican Party stand up for covering up for Russian espionage and whoever in the United States has been helping the Russians. It's going to be a disaster for the Republicans. It's going to be a disaster for our country." In criticizing Trump and his administration, Painter said, "We are well past the point where we were in 1973 (Watergate) with respect to clear evidence of abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and other illegal activities."

In March 2018 Painter announced that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for U.S. Senate in Minnesota, saying he was unsure whether he would seek office as a Republican, Democrat, or independent. In April 2018 he announced that he would run as a Democratic (Minnesota DFL) candidate in the primary against the incumbent Senator Tina Smith. Painter finished a distant second, with 14% of the vote to Smith's 76%.

In February 2022, Painter announced his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives in Minnesota's 1st congressional district. The seat became vacant after the death of Jim Hagedorn. In May 2022, Painter lost the DFL primary, placing third behind Sarah Brakebill-Hacke and Jeff Ettinger.

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