Dana Remus serves as White House Counsel to President Joe Biden.
The position: Top legal adviser to the president – including legal issues related to a president’s decision to sign or veto legislation. The office advises on “ethical questions, financial disclosures and conflicts of interest during employment and post employment,” and “helps define the line between official and political activities, oversees executive appointments and judicial selection, handles presidential pardons, reviews legislation and Presidential statements and handles lawsuits against the President in his role as President,” according to the Federal Register. The counsel to the president also serves as the White House’s contact for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Dana Remus was born in New Hampshire and raised in the town of Bedford.
Remus is a graduate of St. Paul’s School in Concord, a “highly selective college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, affiliated with the Episcopal Church.”
She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2002.
In 2008, Remus clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
She also clerked for Anthony Scirica.
She eventually joined Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
In 2006, she began her academic career as an inaugural faculty member at the newly established Drexel University College of Law (now Thomas R. Kline School of Law).
In 2013, she co-wrote a letter in The Washington Post defending Alito “against accusations of sexism.”
She also taught at the University of New Hampshire School of Law and judicial and legal ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Remus served as Deputy Counsel for Ethics and a Deputy Assistant to Barack Obama.
After Obama left office, Remus joined the Obama Foundation as general counsel and also served as counsel to Michelle Obama.
President Obama officiated her and her husband’s wedding in 2018.
During the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign, she also served as general counsel.