[P]rivate attorney and GOP activist Brady Toensing is leaving Vermont to take a senior counsel position with the U.S. Department of Justice. He starts work for the Office of Legal Policy Monday.
Toensing, 51, announced his resignation as vice chair of the Vermont Republican Party on May 23. An activist lawyer, advocate for open government and head of President Donald Trump’s Vermont campaign committee in 2016, Toensing has long been a thorn in the side of moderate Republicans, iconoclastic lefty U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Democratic establishment in Vermont.
“We are going to miss Vermont, but I am excited to be joining the Department of Justice in a dream job and under the leadership of Attorney General Bill Barr,” Toensing said in an email. “Our youngest is graduating from high school this week, so the timing is pretty good.”
Deb Billado, chair of the Vermont Republican Party, said his seat will remain vacant until the party reorganizes in November. “It’s certainly an opportunity that doesn’t come along every day for lawyer and I’m excited for him,” Billado said.
Toensing and Billado have been Trump stalwarts, pushing away moderate Republican Party members, including Gov. Phil Scott who has rebuffed many of the president’s policies.
Toensing’s connection to Trump runs deep. Last year the president considered retaining Toensing’s mother and stepfather, prominent conservative D.C. attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, to be part of his team handling the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Over the past five years, Toensing has fought with the state’s most prominent politicians in the press and the courts over the state’s gun laws, climate change initiatives, accusations of campaign finance abuse and the state’s refusal to produce public records. He also waded into public disputes with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Gov. Peter Shumlin, and former Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell, accusing them of misconduct.
TJ Donovan, who took Sorrell’s place when he was elected Vermont attorney general in 2016, says Toensing has been a worthy adversary. Donovan appointed him to the Vermont Campaign Finance Task Force in 2017.
“I said to him I hope you’re not leaving Vermont for good, that we need lawyers like Brady in our state,” Donovan said in an interview Monday. “He can be a pain in the butt no doubt, but he holds government officials accountable — he was a worthy adversary, he was tough, he was dogged and he was fair.”
“Brady and I have been fighting for the past three years so my sense is our fights will continue,” Donovan said. “But I also think it’s useful, I will have somebody I can call and have a reasonable conversation with — I anticipate calling upon Brady as issues arise … I have respect for his legal acumen and his integrity.”
Others on the left of the political spectrum weren’t as generous in their appraisal of Toensing’s contributions to the legal and political landscape.
State Sen. Chris Pearson, P/D-Chittenden, who was the subject of one of Toensing’s several campaign finance complaints leveled at liberals, said “he really does epitomize the modern Republican ethic of winning at all costs.”
“I know how hard it is to recruit people to run for office and to serve and when they look at the kind of harassment that can entail at the hands of people like Brady Toensing that discourages more people from being engaged,” Pearson said. “At the same time he’s vigorously defended transparency and the public’s right to know, there’s a tension there I think.”
Most recently, Toensing served as local counsel in a case brought by the National Rifle Association against the state of Vermont over the constitutionality of a new magazine limit put in place last year as part of sweeping reforms to the state’s gun laws.
Toensing won a landmark First Amendment case in 2018. The Vermont Supreme Court ruling set a new precedent making the private emails of officials pertaining to government business subject to public records requests. In that lawsuit, the Charlotte attorney represented the interests of the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic and the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, conservative groups funded by the Koch brothers, that were seeking information about a group of state attorneys general offices — including Vermont’s — investigating Exxon Mobil’s alleged early knowledge and longtime denials of climate change.
Toensing is perhaps best known for his 2016 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice alleging that Sanders pressured People’s United Bank to issue a loan requested by his wife, Jane Sanders, the former president of Burlington College, for the purchase of the former Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington headquarters on Lake Champlain. Last fall, the Vermont U.S. Attorney’s Office dropped an investigation into whether Jane Sanders overstated donor pledges used as collateral for the loan.
Toensing also went after then-Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell in 2015 for alleged campaign finance violations when he accepted $200,000 from a PAC set up by the Democratic Attorneys General Association in his 2012 primary against Donovan. Sorrell was accused of improperly coordinating with the PAC. A special investigator found in 2017 that DAGA — not Sorrell — ran afoul of Vermont campaign finance rules.
When former Gov. Peter Shumlin came under criticism for taking advantage of his neighbor Jeremy Dodge in East Montpelier, Toensing represented Dodge pro bono and helped him reclaim his land.
And then there were the campaign finance cases.
When Sanders promoted former staffer Pearson’s campaign for the state Senate in an email to supporters in 2016, Toensing cried foul. He alleged that the email was an in-kind contribution that generated an $80,000 windfall from 12,000 Sanders fans and therefore violated campaign finance laws.
In 2011, Toensing defended former Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie when he was accused of misusing campaign finance laws by allegedly coordinated with the Republican Governors Association on a poll. In a settlement, Dubie paid $10,000 to the state and $10,000 to the Vermont Foodbank. The RGA settled for $30,000.
Toensing holds an undergraduate degree and obtained a juris doctorate from Georgetown University in 1996. He worked for U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman after law school and then went into private practice. Toensing has represented plaintiffs and defendants in gender discrimination cases, and CIA and FBI employees in internal hearings and investigations, according to a bio on his law firm’s website.
Since 2010, he has represented the former president of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International through multiple lawsuits involving allegations of international money laundering and bank fraud.
His mother, Victoria Toensing, and his stepfather, Joseph DiGenova, are prominent conservative Washington lawyers and fierce advocates for Trump. A recent Politico piece characterized the “husband and wife duo” as the staunchest defenders of the president on TV. Toensing and DiGenova were such a dominant media presence in the Lewinsky affair that Washington Post dubbed them the “Power Couple at the Scandal’s Vortex.”