Prior to his appointment to the Trump administration, Ellis was chief counsel to Rep. Devin Nunes and the Republican majority on the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Ellis served as the Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council (NSC).[6] In March 2020 Ellis was appointed Senior Director for Intelligence on the NSC.[7][8] After Trump lost his bid for re-election in November 2020, Ellis was installed as general counsel of the National Security Agency.[9][10][4] The latter position was within the federal civil service, giving Ellis additional employment protections.[5] The placement was contentious given that a political operative was embedded into a career civilian position.[11]

Trump Tower wiretapping allegationsEdit

Main article: Trump Tower wiretapping allegations

On March 29, 2017, The New York Times reported that Ellis and Ezra Cohen-Watnick were involved in the leaking of intelligence documents to Representative Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee.[12] The following day, The Washington Post reported that John Eisenberg was also involved.[13] In April 2017 the Associated Press quoted a U.S. official as saying that although Cohen-Watnick had access to those kinds of intelligence materials, he did not play a role in helping Nunes gain access to the documents. The official instead suggested that Ellis had shared the documents.[3] According to the U.S. official, Cohen-Watnick was not involved in showing the material to Nunes, did not clear Nunes onto the White House grounds, did not review the material with Nunes, and was not even aware that the material was going to be shared with Chairman Nunes.[12][13]

John Bolton MemoirEdit

The former Trump national security adviser's legal team accused White House aides of improperly trying to stall publication of John Bolton's book The Room Where It Happened because it revealed unflattering material about the president. “U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., voiced doubt,” Spencer Hsu reports. “The oral argument came after a lawyer for the career government official who conducted the initial review for classified information in Bolton’s manuscript contended in a letter to the court that Trump aides had ‘commandeered’ the process, then erroneously claimed the memoir contained classified information and failed to propose edits to facilitate publication.[citation needed]

The government acknowledged that after Ellen Knight, the National Security Council's senior director for records access, concluded Bolton had completed required edits so that the book contained no classified information, national security adviser Robert C. O'Brien, whom Trump appointed to succeed Bolton, ordered an additional review — a move Knight and government attorneys called unprecedented. “O’Brien tapped another new appointee, Michael Ellis — the NSC’s senior director for intelligence and a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — who received his classification authority March 1 and was not officially trained on it until the day after he completed the Bolton manuscript review,” Hsu reports.

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