Steve Munisteri  Stephen Peter Munisteri (born December 25, 1957) is a retired attorney from Houston, Texas, who from 2010 to 2015 was chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. In 2016 he joined the Rand Paul for President Campaign. In 2017, Steve was appointed to the White House staff as Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liaison. Steve Munisteri was elected chairman at the state convention held in Dallas on June 13, 2010, when he unseated Cathie Adams, the wife of a Dallas chiropractor, who had held the position for only eight months. He is the first challenger in modern Texas Republican history to defeat a sitting incumbent for the position of state chairman. Early in his political career, Munisteri served as state chairman of the Texas Chapter of Young Americans for Freedom and founded the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) in 1980. Munisteri stepped down as party chairman to join U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky as a senior advisor to Paul's 2016 presidential campaign. Munisteri was reared in Houston, where his father, Joseph G. Munisteri was an officer of Brown and Root, later president of Enserch Engineers and Construction, Comstock International, and the Texas division of Ford, Bacon & Davis. His mother, Theresa Grasso Munisteri was first a homemaker, and later worked at Rice University in Houston. After her retirement she continues to edit on a contract basis. Munisteri has three brothers and two sisters. He graduated from Memorial High School in the Hedwig Village section of Houston, where he was in the National Honor Society and the debate team. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the UT Law School, completing both degrees in five, instead of seven, years. With his law degree in hand, Munisteri returned to Houston and worked at the law offices of Funderburk and Funderburk (now Funderburk Funderburk Courtois, L.L.P.) for fourteen months before deciding to open his solo law practice, which he continued in partnership with others, for twenty-seven years. Munisteri founded the firm on November 1, 1982, the day before the defeat of Bill Clements as the first Republican governor of Texas since 1873. The firm is now known as Sprott, Rigby, Newson, Robbins & Lunceford, P.C.