Debunking Ron Davis’ Disinformation

Ron Davis in a recent mailer and TV ad claims I am conservative because I clerked for Brett Kavanaugh in 2014, before he was on the Supreme Court, and when he was a relatively unknown lower-court judge. He has also claimed I supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, then “stayed silent” after sexual assault allegations came out against him.

These statements aren’t just false, they’re knowing lies by Davis. The Stranger already debunked much of Ron’s disinformation here. He’s been told directly that what he’s saying is provably untrue–it appears not to matter to him. Here’s the full truth.

Davis’s mailer says that after “Christine Blasey Ford testified, under oath, that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her,” I “stayed silent,” “was rewarded for [my] loyalty with a cushy job at Trump’s Department of Justice,” and “chose the accused over the survivor” and my “career over you.”

Every one of those statements is false. When Dr. Blasey Ford came forward, I did not “stay silent,” I published a second letter calling the sex assault allegations “deeply troubling” and urging the FBI to conduct a thorough and independent investigation. Only two other progressive former clerks signed onto my second letter.  I was cautioned that signing such a letter calling for the FBI to investigate my former boss, as he was being elevated to one of the nine most powerful legal positions in the country, would obviously impact my legal career. I was told I should just say nothing. I did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do.

Sure enough, Justice Kavanaugh has never contacted or spoken with the three of us who signed that letter since the day it came out. Because of the letter I signed against him, I could no longer work as an appellate attorney representing clients before the Supreme Court. At the time, a prominent legal commentator wrote of our letter: “For people who aren’t part of the elite legal world, it’s hard to understand just how rare it is for former clerks to speak out against the interests of their former boss, in even the slightest way. The professional incentives all run strongly against it.”

I moved to Seattle and started work as a low-level federal prosecutor under an Obama-era acting U.S. Attorney in part because of how my career changed when I wrote that second letter. President Obama’s former U.S. Attorney, Tessa Gorman, and Helen Brunner, a 32-year retired DOJ veteran, both involved in my hiring, have released statements calling Ron’s invented claims about my hiring flatly false:

Tessa Gorman: “I worked for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for 25 years. I was hired by the U.S. Attorney appointed by President Clinton, and then worked through the Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump administrations.  President Trump later fired me as U.S. Attorney. As the U.S. Attorney and previously as the First Assistant U.S. Attorney and Criminal Chief, I was involved with the hiring process. Ron Davis’ claim that Will Dreher’s hiring at the U.S. Attorney’s Office had anything to do with President Trump is false. Will’s selection for hire was made within the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle by career civil servants.”

Helen Brunner called Ron Davis’s statements “outrageous,” and said: “I was part of the hiring committee that recommended that Will Dreher be hired. He was hired based on merit. Any suggestion that Will was hired as a ‘reward’ for supposed ‘loyalty’ to President Trump, or because of his statements about then-Judge Kavanaugh, is patently false. We weren’t even aware of those statements at the time.”

Many former law clerks and professors who actually understand the realities above have publicly spoken out in my defense. Here are some:

Daniel Hemel, Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, wrote: “This is someone who put his career on the line to speak out in favor of the Kavanaugh investigation and then went on to prosecute the January 6 insurrectionists. Anyone who knows Will knows that he is a committed progressive and defender of democratic values.” He says that this attack circulated among former Supreme Court clerks who were “surprised and dismayed to see this line of attack from Will’s opponents.”

Jamie Crooks, who founded Fairmark Partners, a law firm that takes on big business, wrote: “The idea that merely working for a conservative justice puts a scarlet ‘C’ on one’s chest is ludicrous.” He calls my second letter calling for an FBI investigation a “remarkable act of conscience that generated enormous attention in our world and probably guaranteed permanent career repercussions.”

Amanda Rice, an appellate attorney who has successfully argued before the Supreme Court for incarcerated peoples’ rights and to limit police overreach, said: “the suggestion that he is (secretly or otherwise) conservative because he clerked for a judge appointed by a Republican president reflects a profound misunderstanding of both clerkships and the federal judiciary.”

Justin Tresnowski, a civil rights attorney, wrote: “I have known Will Dreher for nearly 15 years. The notion that his clerkship for Brett Kavanaugh somehow undermines his status as a progressive or as a supporter of women’s rights is absurd. Young progressive lawyers regularly serve as law clerks for conservative judges. Indeed, those progressive law clerks often play a critically important role, allowing the judge to hear the progressive side of an issue from a trusted voice within the judge’s chambers. Though it is unheard of for law clerks to speak a negative word in public about the judges who employed them, Will signed a public letter calling for a thorough FBI investigation into the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. In publicly signing that letter, Will jeopardized numerous personal and professional relationships, including with a future Supreme Court justice, to do the right thing and to stand with women like Dr. Blasey Ford who accuse powerful men of predatory behavior. He deserves praise for his integrity, not defamatory attacks on his character.”

Davis knows all of that.

There are four other important points to know.

First, the only Supreme Court Justice I’ve ever clerked for is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, for whom I clerked the year the Court recognized a constitutional right to gay marriage, upheld anti-discrimination housing laws, upheld Obamacare, and more. And in the years since, unlike Ron Davis, I have personally worked as a lawyer on issues like voting rights, environmental issues, corporate responsibility, upholding the rule of law, and more, in opposition to the rulings of Judge Kavanaugh and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

Second, I never wanted to or applied to work for Judge Kavanaugh. I was a 24-year old law student when a professor–without asking me in advance–arranged for a clerkship with Judge Kavanaugh, then a relatively new lower court judge. It was common for professors to do this. It was also common for progressive law students to clerk for conservative lower-court judges, and vice-versa. In fact, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, perhaps the most progressive Supreme Court justice, clerked for a conservative judge.  The same was true of Judge Kavanaugh’s clerks, of which more than a dozen were liberal, including the future president of the progressive Alliance for Justice, Rakim Brooks. The fact that he was a lower court judge at the time was also important. He could not disagree with Supreme Court precedent, and saw fewer controversial cases in his role at that time. For example, the year I worked for him, Judge Kavanaugh voted for the Obama Administration’s environmental agencies in 5 out of 6 cases.

Moreover, it has been empirically documented that having progressive law clerks working for conservative judges helps move those judges’ decisions in a more progressive direction, because those clerks are in the room when decisions are made.

Third, I did not sign any letter endorsing Kavanaugh’s confirmation.  When Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, I was asked to sign a letter from all his former clerks supporting his nomination. Every prior Supreme Court justice nominee, and every one since, has had such a letter released on their behalf and signed by every former clerk, progressives and conservatives alike. Every one of those letters has included a line like this: “[W]e urge that [the nominee] be confirmed as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.”  Except for Judge Kavanaugh’s, and that’s because I and one other clerk refused to sign a letter that included an endorsement of him.

The first draft of the letter we were asked to sign included this line: “all of us strongly support his confirmation as the next Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.” I and the second clerk insisted that the letter delete that. The original letter also insinuated that he would be independent or middle of the road: “That principled approach has required Judge Kavanaugh to go his own way in many cases, departing, when necessary, from both liberal and conservative colleagues on the court. His independence has proven influential…” I and the other clerk insisted that be removed, too. We then rewrote the letter to be limited only to our experience with him as our boss. The letter I signed acknowledged that the clerks signing it did not agree with Judge Kavanaugh’s “politics” or “judicial philosophy,” but said he had been a “mentor, boss, and friend to all of us.”

Fourth, I have nearly two decades of public service and experience championing progressive issues: I was a public school teacher in a Title I school, I was an environmental and clean energy lawyer who helped block offshore drilling and preserved state subsidies for renewable energy, I was a federal prosecutor here in Seattle who prosecuted civil rights cases and put January 6th rioters in prison, and I now sue oil, tobacco, and tech companies on behalf of states, individuals, and workers. If I’m a secret conservative, as Ron claims, I don’t know how that slipped past Justice Kagan, the Stranger’s endorsement board, and the progressives who know me and have endorsed me like Erika Evans, Dionne Foster, and the AFL-CIO’s former national political director.

I have spent my career championing progressive issues. I will continue to do so. I hope you will let my track record speak for itself.

Ron Davis has claimed I’m a Trojan horse for the AI industry because I have received donations from tech workers. It’s a ludicrous claim, and a distraction technique–one that journalists have rejected.

Here’s why: Why would AI companies support a candidate who 1) sues them, 2) developed one of the strictest anti-AI platforms in the country, 3) entered a race where AI was never even being discussed, and 4) is running against a former AI CEO?

Let’s walk through the facts:

I am lead counsel suing an AI company in a nationwide class action, and I also sue other AI companies.

The reason I entered this race was to regulate AI. AI is a rapidly accelerating threat to our kids, environment, jobs, privacy, and safety–and yet Olympia has done very little about it. Neither has either of the two candidates I am running against. Ron Davis is a former AI CEO, and the incumbent had not primary sponsored any AI bills the last four years. Moreover, neither had discussed AI in this race until I entered it.

My platform, from the start, proposed a state-wide data centers moratorium, taxing AI, and regulating AI in innumerable ways no AI company supports.

I am supported by AI and tech safety leaders like Rob Eleveld and Albert Fox Cahn because of my focus on this issue and credibility in this space.

One way to fact-check who was concerned about AI from the start is the voter guide, which was locked in mid-May. My statement read: “I’m the only candidate promising to aggressively regulate tech to slow relentless AI disinformation, job loss from AI/automation, and data center growth.” My two opponents said nothing about regulating tech and AI in their statements.

Ron points to the fact that tech and AI employees have donated to my campaign. It’s true, but these are not tech executives–they are rank-and-file workers. I have never taken corporate funding, and never will. But unlike in any other industry, AI employees are often more concerned about the lack of regulation of their own companies than the general public is, and they’ve been donating to pro-regulation candidates all across the country in order to fight back against their own companies’ efforts to defeat regulation.

Jonathan Martin, an investigative journalist (Seattle Times/Post Alley), looked into and debunked Ron’s claims about my campaign donations. He wrote: “Dreher emerged out of nowhere in April with a platform spotlighting the WA legislature’s anemic response to AI, which he’s right about… He’s now … handling a class action vs AI alleging copyright violations, and frames AI as an existential threat to the environment (via power-gobbling data centers), jobs and basic human decency (i.e. deepfake nude factories). … Dreher has raised nearly $260K… about $100K of that haul comes from donors who work at AI companies… But there’s an interesting backstory. Eric Neyman, a researcher-writer with a following in the ethical AI community, uncorked about 50 donations within a week…It’s absurdly possible that it’s all an elaborate ruse and Dreher is a Manchurian candidate for AI, but we got none of those vibes” (Jonathan Martin, Post Alley, June 2026).

This isn’t just happening in my race, it’s all across the country. Maxwell Zeff’s WIRED article from July states, “a group of rank-and-file OpenAI employees have donated more than $215,000 to a super PAC pushing for stricter regulations on frontier AI labs… a populist effort supported by tech workers, labor unions, and other groups… Gabriel Wu, an OpenAI safety researcher [said]: ‘I worry about what will happen if we do not pass responsible regulations and instead allow a few ultra-wealthy and unaccountable individuals to control the future of AI.’” (Maxwell Zeff, WIRED, July 2026). Gabriel Wu has also donated to my campaign. In the Transformer, Victoria Irwin wrote “the most significant inflows come from Anthropic employees who appear to be backing candidates such as Alex Bores and Scott Wiener that favor stricter AI guardrails than their competition.” (Victoria Irwin, Transformer News, May 2026).

Anyone can ask these employees why they’re donating—and journalists have, repeatedly. They’ve consistently said the only thing that would disappoint them is if the candidates they support ended up advocating for less strict regulation.

Indeed! You may have seen that on a mailer.

I currently sue oil companies on behalf of Los Angeles County. That lawsuit, with my name at the bottom, is here.

Previously, I sued the first Trump Administration to block offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic. That lawsuit, with my name at the bottom, is here.

Before that, I defended state subsidies for carbon-free energy against lawsuits from the oil and gas industry, across multiple states.