Michael Fragoso

Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture Program, where he writes and speaks on issues relating to the law, the federal judiciary, and Congress. An attorney in private practice, he served in all three branches of the federal government, including most recently as chief counsel to the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY). His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: Per Curiam, and elsewhere.

As chief counsel to Sen. McConnell, Fragoso was his primary legal advisor and was responsible for, among other things, judicial nominations, immigration, antitrust, constitutional law, and legal issues relating both to the Senate and to national security.

For the last decade Fragoso has played a central role in judicial confirmations. He was chief counsel for nominations and constitutional law for Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), under whose chairmanship he was responsible for the committee’s consideration of Justice Amy Coney Barrett and over eighty lower-court nominees. He also served as deputy assistant attorney general for nominations in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, where he directed the Department’s work on over a hundred judicial nominations.

Before his time at the Department of Justice, Fragoso had a variety of positions in the office Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), eventually serving as legislative director and chief counsel to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. In those roles he managed the judicial-selection process for Arizona, led Sen. Flake’s work on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and orchestrated the successful repeal of the FCC’s data-privacy rule via the Congressional Review Act.

Fragoso started his career as a litigation associate at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and as a law clerk to the Hon. Diane S. Sykes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He received his J.D. from Notre Dame Law School, where he was executive articles editor of the Notre Dame Law Review and president of Jus Vitae, and his A.B. in Classics from Princeton University.

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