Our Advisors and Board

Ian Bassin is co-founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel, where in addition to counseling the President and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional law, his responsibilities included ensuring that White House and executive branch officials complied with the laws, rules and norms that protect the fundamentally democratic nature of our government. His writing on democracy, authoritarianism, and American law and politics has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon and other publications. He is a recipient of a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, the Skoll Award for Social Innovation, and has repeatedly been named among the 500 most influential people in Washington by Washingtonian Magazine. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.

Jeff Berman is a founding partner of Magnet Companies and the CEO of WaitWhat. He previously served as President of Whalerock Industries, a media and technology company based in West Hollywood, and General Manager of Digital Media at the NFL after holding a series of positions at MySpace. Jeff was the independent director on the board of Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce) and has advised companies across a broad range of industries. From 2001-2005, he was Chief Counsel to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer. Jeff has also served as a public defender in the District of Columbia and as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. from Connecticut College.

Cecilia Muñoz is a national leader in public policy and public interest technology. She served as Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council under President Obama, and earlier as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs where she oversaw the Obama Administration’s relationships with state and local governments. Before joining the Obama Administration, Cecilia spent 20 years at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR, now Unidos US), the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization. In June 2000, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in recognition of her work on immigration and civil rights. She also serves on a number of non-profit boards, including the Kresge, MacArthur and Joyce Foundations, Civic Nation, and New America.

Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Before joining AEI, Dr. Schake was the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has had a distinguished career in government, working at the US State Department, the US Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. She has also taught at Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and the University of Maryland. Dr. Schake is the author of five books, among them “America vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved?” (Penguin Random House Australia, Lowy Institute, 2018); “Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony” (Harvard University Press, 2017); “State of Disrepair: Fixing the Culture and Practices of the State Department” (Hoover Institution Press, 2012); and “Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance” (Hoover Institution Press, 2009).

Justin Florence has overseen the organization’s work to advance its mission, including legal, policy, advocacy and communications strategies, as Protect Democracy’s Co-Founder and Legal Director. Justin previously served in the Office of the White House Counsel as Special Assistant to the President and Associate Counsel to the President; as Senior Counsel on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee; and in the Supreme Court and Appellate practices of two leading national law firms. Justin is a Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, where he co-teaches the Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic. His writings on democracy and rule of law issues have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School.

Jeff Berman is a founding partner of Magnet Companies and the CEO of WaitWhat. He previously served as President of Whalerock Industries, a media and technology company based in West Hollywood, and General Manager of Digital Media at the NFL after holding a series of positions at MySpace. Jeff was the independent director on the board of Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce) and has advised companies across a broad range of industries. From 2001-2005, he was Chief Counsel to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer. Jeff has also served as a public defender in the District of Columbia and as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. from Connecticut College.

Jerry Hauser serves as an advisor to senior leaders in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. In his work he draws on his own experience as a senior executive, most recently as the founding CEO of The Management Center, which he led for fifteen years. Jerry also served for seven years as the second-in-command at Teach For America during a period of significant growth, and he worked as the CEO of the Advocacy Institute and as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Before graduating from Yale Law School, where he was active in legal clinics and a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, Jerry taught high school math and US history in Compton, California. He is the coauthor of the book Managing to Change the World.

Richard R. Buery, Jr. is the Chief Executive Officer of the Robin Hood foundation, New York City’s largest anti-poverty organization. From 2014-2018, he served as Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives for the City of New York, in which capacity he implemented Pre-K for All, supported women- and minority-owned businesses, and oversaw a number of mayoral offices. In addition to Robin Hood, he has served as Chief Executive Officer at Achievement First, Chief of Policy and Public Affairs at the KIPP Foundation, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Children’s Aid Society. Richard is a graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard College. Richard founded his first nonprofit at a Roxbury housing development while still in college. He was a teacher in Zimbabwe, a campaign manager to former Cambridge Mayor Ken Reeves, and clerked at the Federal Court of Appeals in New York. Richard is a Public Service Fellow at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where he served as Distinguished Visiting Urbanist during the Spring of 2019. He is also a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, a Senior Fellow at the GovLab at NYU, a partner at the Perception Institute. He serves on the boards of the Kresge Foundation, iMentor, United to Protect Democracy, Atria Health Collaborative, the Grace Church School, and on the Alumni Advisory Council of the Tsai Leadership Program at Yale Law School.