
Daily Kickoff: The D.C. firm where Ketanji Brown Jackson got her start + Biden admin pushing to delist Iran’s IRGC
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett traveled to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Monday, where he met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will receive a classified briefing on the status of Iran nuclear talks this afternoon.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the final remaining hurdle to a new nuclear agreement with Iran is lifting the terror designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Senior U.S. officials cited in the report say a failure to give Iran this concession quickly could cause a breakdown in negotiations in which every other sticking point has been resolved.
The U.S. proposal to remove the terror designation, according to the report, would be based on a commitment from Iran to rein in regional aggression and not to target Americans. Officials argue that if Iran doesn’t keep to those terms, the terror designation could be reimposed. This comes as the Biden administration has so far rebuffed calls from allies to redesignate the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen as terrorists, despite their recent drone and missile attacks on civilians in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
On Sunday, Bennett argued that the U.S. seems willing to agree to a deal with Iran “at almost any cost,” adding, “We are very concerned about the United States’ intention to give in to Iran’s outrageous demand and remove the IRGC from the list of terrorist organizations.”
Sixty-two Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Scott Franklin (R-FL) and including conference chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) signed a letter — a draft of which was obtained by Jewish Insider — to Secretary of State Tony Blinken expressing opposition to withdrawing the IRGC’s terrorism designation.
Franklin told JI on Monday, “Delisting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list is unacceptable under any circumstances. Secretary Blinken must make it clear to Americans, our allies, and Iran that delisting the IRGC is a non-starter.” The letter has not yet been finalized.
In a speech on Myanmar on Monday morning at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Secretary of State Tony Blinken praised the work of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, groups he described as “independent, impartial sources” documenting human rights abuses in the embattled Southeast Asian country.
The speech came days after Blinken spoke with leaders from both organizations, and a month after Amnesty released a report that accused Israel of “apartheid.” Earlier this month, the director of Amnesty International USA, Paul O’Brien, came under fire for comments about American Jewish attitudes toward Israel.
Over the weekend, an Amnesty staffer in the U.K. posted a photo outside the Israeli Embassy in London, where staffers for the organization erected a sign labeling the street “Apartheid Avenue.”
career maker
Ketanji Brown Jackson is the latest Supreme Court nominee who got her start at Nathan Lewin’s first firm

U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill March 21, 2022, in Washington, D.C.
The three jurists most recently nominated to the Supreme Court had very little in common before they were tapped to sit on the highest court in the land. Brett Kavanaugh grew up near Washington, D.C., and attended Yale Law School; Amy Coney Barrett was raised in suburban New Orleans and went to Notre Dame Law School; and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Harvard Law grad whose confirmation hearings are taking place this week, hails from Miami. But they shared one formative experience, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports: As young lawyers, each worked at a now-defunct boutique law firm in Washington called Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin.
Meritocracy: “It was a very unusual firm,” said Nathan Lewin, one of the firm’s founding partners and a crusading attorney known for his decades of work on civil liberties cases. “It was both color-blind and gender-blind. We hired people regardless of race, regardless of gender. It was just the best people, a meritocracy.”
Who’s who: Today, Washington’s most prestigious firms are multinational behemoths that employ hundreds of attorneys. But at Lewin’s old firm — which was acquired two decades ago by Baker Botts LLP, a Houston-based legal giant — the number of attorneys never surpassed three dozen. Other alumni include a who’s who of Washington power players over several administrations. Among them are David Cohn, current deputy director of the CIA; Stuart Levey, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush; and Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.
On the Hill: The Senate Judiciary Committee’s four days of hearings for Jackson began Monday. Jackson, who currently serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, would be the first Black woman on the High Court if she is confirmed by the Senate. Committee Chair Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) kicked off the hearings by praising Jackson’s “record of excellence and integrity,” while Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said Jackson’s past advocacy as a defense attorney has “gone beyond the pale.”
KJ: Lewin does not recall working with Jackson, who spent a year at the firm from 1998 to 1999, although he found the initials “KJ” scrawled in his notes from a case he worked on that year, suggesting she may have assisted him. (The case was about a school in Kiryas Joel, so the initials could also have referred to the town in New York.)
Family matters: Today, Lewin, who is 86, operates an even smaller firm: Lewin & Lewin, a two-lawyer operation with his daughter, Alyza Lewin, who also serves as president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. The pair has worked on several high-profile cases together, including that of Menachem Zivotofsky, who sued former Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014 in a bid to list “Jerusalem, Israel” — rather than simply “Jerusalem” — as his place of birth on his passport. (They lost that case in the Supreme Court, 6-3.)