FAQ

Yes, I clerked for Brett Kavanaugh in 2013-14, before he was on the Supreme Court, when he was a relatively unknown lower-court judge. The Stranger covered this in their endorsement of me, here. Here’s some more context:

• The only Supreme Court Justice I’ve clerked for is 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. In the years since, I have worked 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.
• I never sought 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 him.
• It was 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 Kavanaugh 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. The year I worked for him, Judge Kavanaugh voted for the Obama Administration’s environmental agencies in 5 out of 6 cases.
• Having progressives clerk for conservative judges is a good thing. It has been documented that having progressive clerks in conservative judges’ chambers helps move those judges’ decisions in a more progressive direction, because those clerks are in the room when decisions are made.
• I never endorsed Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Every recent Supreme Court justice nominee (liberal or conservative) other than Kavanaugh has had a letter, signed by all former clerks (liberal or conservative), that 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. That’s because I and one other clerk refused to sign a letter that included an endorsement of his confirmation. We then rewrote the letter to be about our experience with him as our boss. The letter I signed told the truth: that the clerks signing it did not agree with Judge Kavanaugh’s “politics” or “judicial philosophy,” but that he had been a good mentor and boss.
• When Dr. Blasey Ford came forward, 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.
• 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 federal prosecutor under an Obama-era acting U.S. Attorney in part because of how my career changed when I wrote that second letter. Per President Obama’s former U.S. Attorney, Tessa Gorman, my “selection for hire was made within the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle by career civil servants.”

Here is how former law clerks and professors who understand the realities above have described this:

• Daniel Hemel, Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, wrote: “[Dreher] put his career on the line to speak out in favor of the Kavanaugh investigation.”
• Jamie Crooks, who founded Fairmark Partners, a law firm that takes on big business, wrote that our second letter calling for an FBI investigation into Kavanaugh was a “remarkable act of conscience that generated enormous attention in our world and probably guaranteed permanent career repercussions.”
• Amanda Rice, an appellate attorney, said: “the suggestion that [Dreher] 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: “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. [I]t is unheard of for law clerks to speak a negative word in public about the judges who employed them. In publicly signing [the letter calling for an investigation into Kavanaugh], 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.”

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. I’ve worked with Justice Kagan and the AFL-CIO/SEIU, and have been endorsed by the Stranger’s endorsement board and progressives like Erika Evans, Dionne Foster, and the AFL-CIO’s former national political director. I have spent my career championing progressive issues, and I will continue to do so.

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

I also entered this race in order 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. The incumbent had not primary sponsored any AI bills the last four years, and had not 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. As one investigative journalist put it: “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 Apple 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).”

For all of those reasons, 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.

But what about those donations I’ve received from AI employees?

Yes, I have also received donations from people across the country who are excited by a candidate who is clear-eyed about the risks and threats that unregulated AI poses, including from those who work at AI safety organizations and even from those who work as engineers for AI companies.

That’s not unusual. Unlike in most other industries, AI employees are often more concerned about the lack of regulation of AI 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.

For example, a 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 donated to my campaign. Another article described how “the most significant” pro-regulation donations in state races have “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). These same Anthropic employees donated to my campaign.

Journalists have asked these employees why they’re donating, and they consistently say said the only thing that would disappoint them is if the candidates they support ended up advocating for less strict regulation. Those employees support my campaign precisely because I’ve shown a serious commitment to this issue.

No AI company has donated to our campaign or supported it; I don’t accept that kind of corporate money anyway. But I do firmly believe we need to include in the anti-AI grassroots movement all of those–including those workers closest to it–who are worried about our current approach to AI.