Alfred S. Regnery

Alfred S. Regnery (born November 21, 1942), also called Al Regnery, is an American conservative lawyer, author, and former publisher.

Background

Regnery is the son of Henry Regnery (1912–1996), founder of Regnery Publishing, a conservative publishing house founded in 1947.

He graduated from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin in 1965 and received a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, Wisconsin in 1971.

Career

Early in his career, Regnery served as college director of the Young Americans for Freedom, as a Senate aide, and the Lands Division of the U.S. Department of Justice under President Ronald Reagan.

In 1976, he ran for district attorney in Madison, Wisconsin. During that campaign, he publicized allegations to the police that his wife had been injured and forced to have sexual acts with men who had broken into their home. During investigation, police allegedly discovered a "stash of pornography" in the Regnery home.

Regnery served as Legal Counsel to Republican Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada and to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

From 1981 to 1986, he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Land and Natural Resources Division of the United States Department of Justice. In 1983, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and he worked on the Meese Report. On May 21, 1986, Regnery resigned his position as administrator "abruptly" to return to the family business.

He was president of Regnery Publishing from 1986 to 2003. In 1993, he sold Regnery Publishing to Eagle Publishing and took a board position at Eagle. (Eagle Publishing was owned by Tom Philips, a Republican donor.) He was also a partner at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Keller and Heckman LLP until 2003.

From 2003 to 2012, he was the publisher of The American Spectator.He was asked to resign by the Board of Directors of the American Spectator Foundation because of editorial differences.

Currently, he is managing director of the Paul Revere Project for Salem Eagle, a subsidiary of Salem Communications (which also bought the Regnery imprint) and has served on Salem Eagle's board since 1993.

Associations

In 1995, Regnery co-founded the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund; in 2014, he became chairman of its board, which includes Edwin Meese III, J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ron Hosko, and Ken Cuccinelli as directors. Currently, he serves as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

He served as trustee of the Philadelphia Society from 2011 to 2014.