The Secret Plan to Strike Down US Gun Laws – Mother Jones

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. A version of this story was first published online in July.

For decades, McLean Bible Church has served as the place of worship for many of DC’s Republican elite. The sprawling evangelical megachurch in Vienna, Virginia, boasts a roster of former parishioners that includes everyone from Ken Starr to Mike Pence. Donald Trump once dropped in after a round of golf.

McLean Bible is also where, in 2017, a senior pastor named Dale Sutherland formed a nonprofit called Act2Impact, described in state records as an “auxiliary” of the church that would “preach the gospel” and “conduct evangelistic and humanitarian outreach.”

That mission was short-lived.

Two years later, Sutherland—once an undercover narcotics officer in DC—left McLean Bible and filed papers to rename Act2Impact. It became the Constitutional Defense Fund (CDF), which would “promote and secure” constitutional rights. “We aim to defend and strengthen those rights through methods that will include litigation and other means,” the filing stated.

Around this time, Sutherland also leaned into a new persona: the Undercover Pastor. “Buying cocaine and preaching Jesus. A weird combo,” notes his website, which touted a newsletter—“get biblical wisdom delivered to your inbox”—and YouTube channel. “I used to lock people up,” he likes to say. “Now I’m trying to set people free.”

Sutherland is much less forthcoming about CDF, which since its re­christening has been at the center of a ­far-­reaching, multimillion-dollar legal campaign to dismantle America’s gun laws. From 2020 to 2023, CDF funneled more than $14 million to the DC law firm Cooper & Kirk and a constellation of gun rights groups, which together have helped file at least 21 lawsuits challenging gun restrictions.

These suits, aimed at getting an ­eventual Supreme Court hearing, concern bans on semiautomatic assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, as well as restrictions on young adults buying and carrying handguns. In October, the court heard one of the cases, a challenge to the government’s ability to regulate home-assembled, unserialized “ghost guns.”

Most of the money that CDF spent on this vast effort came via Donors Trust, a pass-through fund founded in 1999 with the aim of “safeguarding the intent of libertarian and conservative” philanthropists who seek to channel their wealth into right-wing causes. The trust has more than $1 billion in assets and is not required to identify its donors.

In short, anonymous funders bankrolled a legal attack aimed at giving the Supreme Court’s conservative majority an opportunity to rewrite firearms laws. It’s akin to the Christian right’s abortion playbook—but for guns.

The Firm

In August 2019, before stepping on a podium in Colonial Williamsburg, Charles Cooper was introduced as a “legend” of the conservative legal world. He began by warming up the crowd at a gathering of the Convention of States Project, which seeks to amend the Constitution and eliminate what supporters consider ambiguous language that has enabled liberal advances. “Are there any freedom-loving, anti-communist patriots in this room?” The audience cheered. “Do any of you cling to your Bibles and your guns?”

The day before, Cooper had lost his decades-long­ gig as the National Rifle Association’s outside counsel. As details of financial abuses at the organization became public, many rallied around then-CEO Wayne ­LaPierre. Cooper did not and was purged.

Before representing the NRA, Cooper held a key role in the Justice Department. His Reagan-era DOJ opinions—for instance, one finding that employers could refuse to hire those with AIDS—burnished his reputation as a strident conservative. Cooper tapped Samuel Alito to be his deputy and, two decades later, would guide him through the Supreme Court confirmation process. By then, Cooper had founded Cooper & Kirk, which became known as the conservative movement’s prestige advocate. It hired zealots from elite law schools, including Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, as well as Noel Francisco, who would become Trump’s solicitor general in his first term. Cooper defended Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage, and represented Jeff Sessions when the then-attorney general was under scrutiny for his contacts with Russian officials in 2016.

Cooper’s Williamsburg speech was titled “The Real Threat to the Second Amendment.” He described how his work had contributed to split circuit court rulings on whether people have a right to carry guns outside the home for self-defense. A case that would resolve that question, he noted, was before the Supreme Court.

Cooper was referring to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which challenged a state law requiring applicants for concealed carry permits to demonstrate a heightened need for protection. At the time, Cooper & Kirk was representing the plaintiffs. Although the firm did not argue the case before the court—that job was given to star Supreme Court advocate Paul Clement—invoices show that in April 2021, the month the justices agreed to hear Bruen, Cooper & Kirk managing partner David H. Thompson conferred with lead attorneys on the case about an “amicus panel,” a body of subject experts that advises on litigation strategy.

CDF money went to attorneys and advocacy groups that filed briefs backing the plaintiffs. Such filings, known as amicus briefs, are integral to legal strategy and are often cited in higher court rulings. Thompson filed an amicus brief in Bruen on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation, which has received CDF funding. Another partner at the firm did so on behalf of J. Joel Alicea, himself a Cooper & Kirk attorney identified in the brief only as a professor at Catholic University. The CDF-funded Firearms Policy Foundation (since renamed FPC Action Foundation) and a closely related group, the Firearms Policy Coalition, filed their own amicus brief. So did the archconservative Claremont Institute, which got a $105,000 CDF grant in 2021 to support gun rights. John Eastman—the lawyer who helped rally Trump’s faithful before they stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and is now under indictment in Georgia and Arizona for attempting to subvert the 2020 election—wrote the Claremont brief. (Eastman’s law license has been temporarily suspended in California and DC.)

The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Bruen was momentous. Conservative justices not only struck down New York’s law, but also established a new test for the constitutionality of all gun restrictions. No longer should courts weigh the government’s interest in reducing violence or promoting public safety against the right to bear arms, the majority said. Rather, the ­constitutionality­ of gun laws should depend on whether they’re similar enough to restrictions in place when the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, or when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868—points at which, the justices said, the original meaning of the Second Amendment is best discerned.

Thanks to Bruen, lower courts have been deluged with gun law challenges. In the last two years, judges have issued, on average, more than one Bruen-related ruling daily, and firearms restrictions are being struck down at an unprecedented clip. “We are more excited than ever about the future,” declared Brandon Combs, who directs both the Firearms Policy Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, after the Bruen ruling. “Indeed, FPC is already working with the exceptional litigators at Cooper & Kirk—truly the best in the space—on the largest Second Amendment litigation program in the country.”

The Plaintiffs

Of course, before Cooper & Kirk can get involved, a plaintiff is needed. That’s where the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition come in. They not only act as plaintiffs themselves, but they also recruit individuals who can claim standing, a direct injury from the law that’s being challenged.

Since 2020—the year Trump replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett—a torrent of funding from CDF has helped turn the groups into juggernauts. In the three years prior to 2020, they were plaintiffs in 22 federal actions; in the three subsequent years, that number jumped to 61. “We want to get a case before the Supreme Court,” Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb said in 2023. “And the quicker these cases move, the better for gun ownership and for gun rights.”

Gottlieb is known for direct-mail and marketing savvy, and for cashing in on right-wing causes through private companies that have business arrangements with his advocacy groups. He created the Second Amendment Foundation in the early 1970s, and in 1984, he pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud. He was sentenced to a year in prison, which he served largely on work release. (More recently, the attorney general of Washington state investigated Gottlieb, who sued in response, claiming political harassment.)

In the late 1980s, Gottlieb gained public notice as an architect of the Wise Use movement, which capitalized on a backlash to federal control of land in Western states and environmental regulation. “I’ve never seen anything pay out as quickly as this whole Wise Use thing has done,” Gottlieb said in an interview from the time. “It touches the same kind of anger as the gun stuff, and not only generates a higher rate of return, but also a higher average dollar donation. My gun stuff runs about $18. The Wise Use stuff breaks $40.” When news stories linked the movement to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Gottlieb described them as “overplayed.” In 2023, he headlined the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an event hosted by the Rod of Iron Ministries, which is led by a son of Moon. The MAGA-allied church glorifies AR-15-style rifles—the type of gun used in an attempt to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally—seeing in them the biblical “rod of iron,” Christ’s prophesied instrument of dominion at Armageddon.

In November 2022, Gottlieb gave a deposition as part of a challenge to an Illinois gun law. He testified that an anonymous funder was paying his counsel, Cooper & Kirk, which had given him a statement outlining how much money the donor had spent to support roughly a dozen foundation lawsuits underway in 2021. When asked whether he knew who was paying Cooper & Kirk, Gottlieb testified, “I wish I did.”

That remark alarms some experts, who argue that rules of professional responsibility require that a client knows who is paying their counsel before consenting to representation. “He’s either just lying or the firm is delinquent in getting informed consent,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who specializes in legal ethics and firearms regulation. In response to written questions, Gottlieb said that his deposition answers were “accurate” and that “merely because a third party may have paid for some services rendered, the Second Amendment Foundation retains control over all legal direction, strategy, and settlement authority, which is wholly ethical.”  

Gottlieb is not the operation’s only player who is apparently unaware of his beneficiary’s identity. In 2021, CDF paid Gary Kleck, a professor emeritus at Florida State University whose work has been touted by gun interests for decades, $6,900, according to an IRS filing. Kleck told me the money was a consulting fee from Cooper & Kirk for work he’d done on Bruen. “I have no idea what the Constitutional Defense Fund is,” he said, “and had never heard of it before you contacted me.”

The Professor

Even when they go before a friendly court, the lawyers and plaintiffs need research to bolster their case. Enter Georgetown assistant professor William English, who in 2021 received a $58,750 CDF grant and the same year filed a key brief supporting the Bruen plaintiffs.

Last June, in an investigation revealing CDF’s dark money operation, the New York Times detailed how English’s Bruen brief was filed jointly with the Center for Human Liberty—which had been incorporated in Nevada two months earlier. (The center shares an address and leadership with the Firearms Policy Coalition and Firearms Policy Foundation.) The brief was prepared by a Manhattan attorney, Edward Paltzik, whose firm received $80,000 from CDF in 2021. It argued that, based on English’s own research, there was no link between right-to-carry laws, higher numbers of gun carry permits, and violent crime. The research had not been peer-reviewed.

English’s work suited the plaintiffs perfectly. Clement cited it during oral arguments, and Charles Cooper’s pal Alito did so in a concurring opinion. An update English later published concluded that assault rifles are in “common use,” a finding central to the movement’s legal advocacy post-Bruen. Gun interests have cited English’s work in dozens of motions and pleadings nationwide.

Academics on both sides of the gun debate have found defects in his scholarship. During a 2023 deposition in an Oregon case, Kleck, the Florida State professor, said English’s survey can’t be relied on. “He’s vague about exactly how he developed his sample,” Kleck said. “And there is nothing in his report to contradict the assumption that what he had was a self-selected sample.”

I’d been trying to get English and Georgetown to answer questions about his work since the Bruen ruling came down. Only after I paid a visit to the gated community where then-Georgetown President John DeGioia lived did the university’s communications office respond, stating: “Georgetown respects and supports academic freedom, including the right of its faculty members to conduct independent research. The University’s Institutional Review Board reviewed this study before the survey began, and the survey costs were supported by an external grant that did not flow through the University.”

However, the tax ID number that CDF reported to the IRS in conjunction with English’s grant is Georgetown’s. Asked to clarify the meaning of “did not flow through the university,” a Georgetown spokesperson said the university is “unable to identify any record of Constitutional Defense Fund funds flowing through Georgetown and is uncertain why the University’s tax identification number appears in CDF’s records.”

In late June, English published a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he defended his work, bashed the Times, and characterized attempts by me and other reporters to get answers from him as “harassment.” English wrote that media outlets “are signaling that they will cancel academics who state inconvenient facts…Those of us who want to foster an evidence-based public-­policy discourse should reject these tactics, and courts should take note of them.”

The Middleman

Lawyers and academics all need to be paid, which brings us back to the Undercover Pastor.

Sutherland likes to tout his time with the DC police, but not all of his undercover work ended smoothly. In one early 1990s case, Sutherland and his partner Joseph Abdalla—who would later sit on the board of CDF—handled an informant named Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was shot multiple times and killed. When federal prosecutors tried members of the drug crew suspected in the killing, it emerged that Williams had been allowed to continue making street buys for Sutherland, who was posing as a Georgetown University construction worker seeking crack, despite the fact that Sutherland’s presence caused dealers unease, according to court transcripts. At trial, evidence went missing, including a pager in Sutherland’s possession that defense attorneys argued could shed light on the crimes. “I am going to get the chief of police and the United States attorney in here and read them the riot act,” the judge said at one point. “To lose evidence of various kinds day after day is just not satisfactory.” Prosecutors dropped the murder charge but obtained drug conspiracy convictions against the defendants.

After Sutherland left the DC police force in 2013, his role at McLean Bible, where he’d long held staff positions, grew. In 2016, he began talks with the Southern Baptist Convention on a partnership to “plant” churches in the DC region. Sutherland founded an entity called New City Network, an arm of McLean Bible, to carry out the work. Concerned that the partnership violated McLean’s constitution, which requires the church to remain unaffiliated, a group of members filed suit against McLean in 2022.

The legal battle revealed a complex series of money transfers totaling more than $7 million between McLean, the convention, and New City Network. Satisfied that records and testimony demonstrated the partnership had indeed violated McLean’s constitution, the plaintiffs dropped the suit in 2023. In a letter summarizing the case, however, their attorney made clear that questions remain: “Current and former church leaders deposed could not explain the reasons for this unorthodox payment structure, or state with confidence where the money went specifically.” A church webpage allows that “financial transactions for the church planting were sometimes confusing,” but says an independent audit accounted for the money spent. 

In a deposition, Sutherland said he’d left McLean Bible and his role leading New City Network in May 2019. He was unable to name any churches the network had started, save for one in Falls Church, Virginia, where he and his son-in-law now preach. “For Heaven’s sake,” Sutherland said. “I can picture all the pastors in my head. I just can’t think of the names they gave their churches. Boy oh boy.”

One of the plaintiffs in the suit, Jeremiah Burke, said Sutherland’s limited recall was an act. “He repeatedly recounts, in his podcast and on his Instagram page, in vivid detail, events from 20 and 30 years ago with absolute precision, events in which he is the hero,” Burke said. “However, in his deposition, having sworn under oath to tell the truth, Dale somehow couldn’t call to mind details of significant events from the recent past.”

A former McLean Bible elder, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal church matters, described Sutherland as “kindhearted” and a “warrior for the Lord,” but also “deceptive.” During the church planting drive, he said, Sutherland “did things the way he wanted to, he just kind of ran rogue.” The elder said Sutherland “is a pretty good talker, he can sell pretty well,” and would “cuddle up next to” the church’s “big donors.”

As Sutherland left McLean Bible and established CDF, he began to collect more money from his array of nonprofits, including Code 3 Association, whose stated goal is better relations between police and the public. (Abdalla is a director there, too.) In 2020, these nonprofits paid Sutherland and his private company, Code 3 Consulting, more than $200,000. Over the next three years, Sutherland collected more than $1 million from his nonprofits. He also began flipping DC properties, buying at least a dozen homes valued at $7 million and selling them for more than $11 million.

In short, Sutherland has been awash in cash since he filed paperwork to create CDF. In one sense, he’s an odd middleman. People who know him can’t recall Sutherland expressing support for scuttling gun laws. “I never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or gun rights,” the former elder said. “I never did, nope, and I was with him a lot.”

But Sutherland’s history overlaps with another of the operation’s main figures. Speaking to an interviewer in 2023, Thompson, the Cooper & Kirk managing partner who has overseen much of the firm’s Second Amendment work, praised the church that was his spiritual home for two decades. “I grew up Episcopalian,” said Thompson, who did not respond to written questions for this story, “and about 20 years ago, I became a born-again Christian and went to McLean Bible Church.”

Twice while investigating this story, I knocked on the door of Sutherland’s home to no avail. Attempts to reach him by phone failed. Then, in mid-June, he answered. I asked him how he’d come to be running money through CDF to Cooper & Kirk. “Sir, I am in the car with my grandson,” Sutherland said, “and I am not talking.”

The Dark Money

In 2016, a young man in Washington state, angry and jealous after a breakup, bought an AR-15-style rifle, 60 rounds of ammunition, and multiple 30-round magazines. Then he killed three people, including his ex-girlfriend, at a house party. He later blamed his actions in part on easy access to guns. The killings prompted the state legislature to enact a ban on high-capacity magazines and assault rifles. The Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, as co-plaintiffs, filed suits in 2022 and 2023 to strike down the bans. Cooper & Kirk is their counsel in the magazine capacity case. English’s survey findings were cited by the plaintiffs in both ongoing suits. But after the state subpoenaed English in the assault rifle case, the plaintiffs agreed not to rely on his work.

Autumn Snider’s son, 19-year-old Jake Long, was the first to be shot and killed at the party. Snider said those with the means to fund litigation meant to affect public policy should be free to do so—as long as they do so openly. “You have the obligation to reveal who you are and should have the confidence to provide transparency to the public,” Snider told me. “If you can’t be forthcoming with who you are, that is a red flag.”

Defenders of using dark money to support litigation liken the practice to anonymous political speech, which enjoys First Amendment protection. But such arguments have limits, said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA who has written a book on the gun debate. “First Amendment rights are mitigated by the need to ensure the integrity of the judicial system,” Winkler argues. “We generally don’t allow parties in a case to be anonymous.” Anonymous funding arrangements—not uncommon in the realm of impact litigation—effectively allow an “end run” around judicial ethics safeguards, he said. “How do you know whether there is any impropriety, any influence peddling?” Winkler said. “It’s fundamentally problematic.”

Seth Endo, an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law, said the debate involves fundamental questions about the role of courts. If courts are neutral arbiters of the rights and responsibilities of disputing parties, then it’s easy to argue that disclosure is irrelevant. However, if courts are not detached umpires but themselves political agents that drive social change—certainly a charge leveled at the Supreme Court—then the public has a strong interest in knowing who’s enabling litigation.

Given Cooper & Kirk’s ties to deep-­pocketed conservatives, there are any number of suspects who may be routing millions of dollars through Donors Trust to Sutherland’s CDF—and on to the advocacy groups and their lawyers.

Donors Trust is a pass-through that effectively conceals the identities of individuals and groups backing right-wing causes. (On the left, organizations like the Tides Foundation do the same.) Those who give to Donors Trust can say how they’d like their money to be spent, but they don’t have the final word. In exchange for giving up that control, they get upfront tax benefits. Prominent funders and architects of the modern conservative movement, including the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer, have all moved money through Donors Trust. 

Sutherland’s CDF ended 2023, the last year for which IRS filings are available, with $330,000 in Donors Trust cash on hand. In 2022, he formed a similarly named nonprofit in Virginia, and in 2023, he did so in Utah. In September 2024, six weeks after this story was initially published, Sutherland dissolved CDF, according to state records.

A French documentary series on Sutherland called Dale ­L’Infiltré, or Dale Undercover, was unveiled early last year. In it, Sutherland describes himself as an avid shapeshifter whose undercover guises included a drug kingpin, arms dealer, and Mafia boss. Several of the operations that the series highlights were aimed at getting guns off the street in DC. “I had to come up with these crazy schemes and then try and convince people that it was true,” Sutherland says. “This is where my faith made a big difference. I felt an extra confidence, a strength, to be able to face dangerous situations mentally.”

The Justices

On October 8, Pete Patterson, a partner at Cooper & Kirk, stood before the Supreme Court and argued that the Biden administration had overstepped by enacting a rule to crack down on ghost guns.

The firm, which was once again representing the Firearms Policy Coalition, had successfully steered the case through the right-wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. One of the individual plaintiffs—a former police officer and teacher named Jennifer VanDerStok—said in an interview with a gun rights group that she was “representative of the average American patriot” and warned of “deep state involvement” in an effort to “subvert our nation.”

Informed of Sutherland’s ties to the case, a former colleague, retired DC police Sergeant Gerald Neill, said: “I don’t understand why he would do that. From my point of view of the world, and probably Dale’s, we don’t want people to have ghost guns.”

Patterson told the justices that the 2022 rule—which requires serial numbers and background checks for “ready-to-build” gun kits—was improper because such products shouldn’t be covered by a federal law regulating items that can be “readily converted” into firearms. The argument quickly turned into one of competing food analogies: “I put out on a counter some eggs, some chopped-up ham, some chopped-up pepper, and onions. Is that a Western omelet?” Alito asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who was defending the ghost gun rule. No, she replied, because those ingredients could be made into something other than an omelet.

Barrett then offered a more apt comparison: “Would your answer change if you ordered it from HelloFresh and you got a kit, and it was, like, turkey chili, but all of the ingredients are in the kit?” Yes, Prelogar said.

A majority of the justices seemed to agree with Prelogar, though a ruling isn’t expected until the middle of 2025. Other cases tied to the dark money operation continue to advance. The court is currently considering one of them, a challenge to Maryland’s assault rifle ban, that could topple similar laws across the country.