In what could prove to be a momentous development, the new top lawyer at the ever-overreaching Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is a Second Amendment proponent and scholar who clerked for the Supreme Court’s foremost gun-rights advocate. “Good news from the DOJ today,” said the National Association for Gun Rights. “This one could be HUGE.”
The move came without any official publicity. Robert Leider‘s name and photo simply appeared on the ATF Leadership page last week, indicating he now holds the title of Assistant Director/Chief Counsel. Leider fills a vacancy created by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s February firing of previous Chief Counsel Pamela Hicks.
At the time, Bondi told Fox News, “Yesterday I fired the general counsel from ATF. These people were targeting gun owners. Not gonna happen under this administration.” Continuing to shake things up last month, Trump also made the unusual move of giving Kash Patel control of the ATF as well at the FBI.
Leider comes to his new role from an associate professor post at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. Earlier in his career, he clerked for Clarence Thomas when Thomas was a Seventh Circuit and then a Supreme Court justice. He has a blog encouragingly titled Standing His Ground, and has written about gun control, self-defense law and what he calls the “constitutional allocation of military power.”
In an April 2024 blog post about gun control targeting AR-15’s and other rifles, Leider assailed a lower-court ruling that upheld an Illinois AR-15 and “high capacity” magazine ban, with judges claiming the Supreme Court’s Heller ruling asserted the Second Amendment only applies to self-defense against crime. “The Seventh Circuit’s rule…that arms most useful in military service are constitutionally unprotected is a complete perversion of the traditional understanding of the Second Amendment,” Leider wrote. In an August 2024 article published at SSRI, Leider championed the idea that the Second Amendment protects “an individual right for common defense.”
Hellbound and Down 