Lawyer who ‘indicted’ Obama to represent Nancy Mace in airport lawsuit
Nancy Mace doesn’t like backing down.
Last week, the U.S. House representative who is running for governor was caught on surveillance footage yelling at staff members at the Charleston Airport over a security mix-up. Another politician might have issued an apology. Instead, Mace announced that she is planning to sue the Charleston Airport.
In a pending lawsuit, she is being represented by Larry Klayman, a well-known conservative attorney, legal activist and serial litigant. Klayman, who currently has his law license suspended in two jurisdictions, has spent much of his legal career filing lawsuits against everyone from the Clinton family to the Ayatollah of Iran and even his own mother.
“We believe Congresswoman Mace has been subjected to a calculated and coordinated effort to malign her character through deliberately falsified documentation,” said Klayman is a statement released to the media. The statement said that his law firm, Klayman Law Group, P.A. was representing Mace.
Klayman said that they planned to name a laundry list of defendants, including the CEO of the Charleston airport, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, Wilson’s chief of staff, several airport police officers and an unnamed American Airlines gate agent.
When reached, Klayman declined to discuss specific details about the lawsuit and referred The State to the press release.
It is the second lawsuit that Klayman has gotten involved with related to Mace. Earlier this year, he filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Alan Wilson, one of Mace’s opponents in the South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial primary. The lawsuit, which also names Charleston County Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, alleges that the prosecutors withheld public records relating to Wilson’s “failure to prosecute sex abusers, particularly involving crimes against women and children.”
Klayman has also donated $1,041.02 to Mace’s campaign for governor, according to South Carolina Elections filing data.
Representatives of the Mace campaign declined to answer questions and referred The State to Klayman. In remarks earlier this week, she blasted the release of the surveillance footage and police report from the incident as a “political hit job.”
“No American, let alone a sitting member of Congress, should be subject to institutional misconduct and defamation of this nature. We intend to hold both American Airlines and Charleston International Airport fully accountable for their actions,” Klayman said in his statement.
Claire Brady, a spokesperson for Wilson’s campaign issued a statement accusing Mace of using “lawfare to silence her enemies and take out her top political rival.”
“We’re not surprised or bothered and hope she gets the help she needs,” Brady said.
Who is Larry Klayman?
Like Mace, Klayman is no stranger to high profile crusades. Klayman began his nearly 50-year career in 1977, when he graduated from Emory Law School, where he volunteered on Jimmy Carter’s campaign.
After graduating, he worked for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Consumer Affairs division but left to go into private practice. Since then, he’s become a prolific filer of legal actions aligned with conservative and fringe causes. In 1994, Klayman founded Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group and government watchdog, and launched a decades long war with the Clinton family.
He filed 18 lawsuits against the Clinton administration and represented one of Bill Clinton’s mistresses in a lawsuit against the president. He would later accuse the Clintons of running a smear campaign against him when a journalist from Newsweek revealed that Klayman had sued his own mother in a dispute over medical bills, according to Slate.
When reached, Klayman declined to discuss any biographical details.
On his website, Klayman describes himself as an advocate for government ethics, freedom and personal liberty. Other sources, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have characterized him as a “serial litigant and professional gadfly.”
In 2004, Klayman ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Florida. That same year, he also founded another organization, Freedom Watch, after leaving Judicial Watch.
Throughout the 2000s, Klayman’s legal actions have continued to focus on right-wing preoccupations.
In 2012, Klayman joined the “birther” cause and filed a lawsuit arguing the disproven conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was ineligible to be president because he was born in Kenya. Klayman formed “citizen grand juries,” which are not official and carry no legal weight, to “indict” President Barack Obama with fraud due to his supposed foreign birth and “involuntary manslaughter” for the deaths of several Navy SEALs in Afghanistan.
He would go on to “indict” President Joe Biden and former FBI director Robert Mueller, among others, in citizen grand juries. He also filed a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton alleging that lax security around her private email server led to the deaths of two Americans killed in 2012 the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi. That lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge.
At least two different U.S. District judges have banned Klayman from their courtrooms, according to reporting from Slate. Federal courts in D.C. have suspended Klayman’s license to practice law before them multiple times, including in 2021 and 2022. Most recently, in August 2025 the Washington, D.C. Court of Appeals issued an 18-month suspension over his behavior while representing rancher Cliven Bundy, who became a far-right hero when he initiated a standoff with the federal government.
As part of a process known as “reciprocal discipline,” his law license was also suspended in Pennsylvania.
Klayman does not appear to be barred in South Carolina and is currently facing a disciplinary proceeding in Florida over his other license suspensions.
In a phone conversation with The State, he said that they planned to have local counsel in South Carolina and said that his license in Florida was “perfectly good.”
He is the author of the books, “It Takes a Counter Revolution” and “Whores: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment,” which describes Judicial Watch’s battles “against corruption and abuse of power in the United States government,” according to the book’s description on Amazon.
Klayman sued Judicial Watch in 2012 and again in 2014 over claims related to his failure to pay child support. In 2019, Judicial Watch won a $2.3 million judgment against Klayman in a federal trademark lawsuit.
This story was originally published November 7, 2025 at 5:00 AM.