Cliff Sloan

Clifford Sloan is an attorney and American diplomat who served as Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure at the United States Department of State. Sloan is currently a Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center and retired partner for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates. Previously, Sloan was the publisher of Slate magazine.

Education Sloan graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1975 and was senior class president and editor-in-chief of the yearbook. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College in 1979 and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1984. During his time at Harvard Law, Sloan and classmate Eliot Spitzer assisted Alan Dershowitz with the Claus von Bülow murder case. In the 1990 movie Reversal of Fortune, about the case, Sloan and Spitzer are portrayed by Felicity Huffman and Annabella Sciorra. After his time at Harvard Law, he served as a Supreme Court clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens.

In 1987, he went to work as an associate to Ken Starr in the Office of Independent Counsel, assigned to investigate the Iran-Contra affair. He followed that with a position as an associate at Onek, Klein & Farr, a now-defunct Washington firm. In 1989, he joined the U.S. Solicitor General's office and argued five Supreme Court cases on behalf of the government. In 1991, Sloan joined Chicago-based Mayer, Brown & Platt, as it was then called, as associate and then partner. Following the death in July 1993 of his colleague Vince Foster, Sloan reported to Nussbaum that he saw scraps of paper, which turned out to be a suicide note, in the bottom of Foster's briefcase, according to an attorney representing Foster's family who was present for the exchange. In an FBI interview in August 1993, Sloan said he never inspected the briefcase.

in 1995, he became a partner at the Washington firm Wiley, Rein & Fielding, where he co-chaired the Supreme Court and appellate practice group and the Internet practice group. In 2009, Sloan co-authored the book The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court with David McKean. The book is about the Marbury v. Madison case.

Following the 2008 election, Sloan made several appearances on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, including a two-part segment where Sloan "vetted" Stephen Colbert for a possible appointment to the Obama administration.

The previous Special Envoy, Daniel Fried, was granted seniority high enough he was addressed as Ambassador. When Fried was reassigned on January 28, 2013, no replacement was announced, and it was reported that the office was being shut down. Fried had not been able to initiate a new transfer for more than a year prior to his reassignment. However, in May 2013, Obama had re-iterated his commitment to closing the Guantanamo camps during a speech at the National Defense University.

Controversy On February 5, 2019, The New York Times reported that Sloan, again serving as partner at the Skadden law firm, worked on the Paul Manafort-linked lobbying project for the Russia-aligned former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. According to government filings, Manafort arranged for Skadden to receive $4 million from a Cypriot account that Manafort controlled, funneled through an oligarch.

Later career In 2019, Sloan retired from Skadden and became a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Sloan is also the author of "The Court At War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made."

Personal life Sloan is married to Mary Lou Hartman, the former director of the Mitchell Scholarship program. They live in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They have two daughters, Sarah and Annie, and a son, Nick, and they are all Chicago Cubs fans.

He suffered a heart attack in 2000.