Donald Trump told Fox News earlier this month that he intended to use the power of his office to go after several prominent law firms. Evidently, he was serious. NBC News reported on the president’s latest move against the legal profession.
Trump signed an executive order [Tuesday] punishing a law firm that hired Andrew Weissmann, a Trump critic who was a prosecutor on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. The order directs that employees of the firm Jenner & Block be stripped of security clearances and have their access to federal buildings limited and that federal agencies terminate any contracts with the firm.
If you’re new to this story, it’s worth pausing to review how we arrived at this point.
About a month ago, the White House took an unprecedented step, punishing a prominent private law firm, Covington & Burling LLP. The New York Times described the move as “a breathtaking escalation.” A week later, the Republican nevertheless did it again, punishing Perkins Coie, a large international law firm with some prominent Democratic clients.
The tactics did not go unnoticed. Indeed, when Perkins Coie filed suit, challenging the legality of Trump’s order, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell temporarily blocked the president’s policy, saying in reference to the executive order, “It sends little chills down my spine.” The judge added, “I am sure that many in the profession are watching in horror at what Perkins Coie is going through.”
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a constitutional scholar, had a similar reaction, describing the White House’s offensive as “dangerous as hell.”
A week later, Trump did it again, targeting the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison law firm, ahead of the president extending his revenge tour to a fourth firm this week.
In case this weren’t quite enough, he also signed an executive order last week that effectively threatened to punish any law firms that, from his perspective, challenge his administration in ways he considered “unreasonable.”
The president has justified his campaign against the legal professions by claiming that the firms “did bad things” and attacked him “ruthlessly, violently, illegally.” That was bonkers — there is literally no evidence of the firms having been violent or committing crimes in cases related to Trump — but he apparently expects the public to go along with the bizarre claims anyway.
But as ridiculous as the White House’s line has been, it has also proved quite effective. One of the targeted firms caved to Trump’s demands and gave the president everything he wanted as part of a deal that led him to rescind his order. Others are turning down clients the White House might not like, while scrubbing their websites of names that might draw the president’s ire.
When pressed, Trump has said he simply wants law firms “to behave themselves.” As to what that means in practice, he apparently means that firms will have nothing to worry about just so long as they hire lawyers the White House approves of, take cases the White House approves of, adopt employment practices the White House approves of, and avoid litigation the White House might not like.
If this sounds like how the legal system might work in an authoritarian system, it’s not your imagination.
There’s no great mystery behind the motivation. The single great obstacle between Trump and his radical goals is not Congress. It’s not public opinion. It’s not norms or traditional institutional constraints. It’s not shame or fear of embarrassment.
It’s the courts — or more to the point, opponents of his agenda who’ve filed suit and brought their concerns to the courts, where the White House has been losing a lot over the last several weeks.
In response, the president, his team and their allies have launched an extraordinary political offensive intended to smear judges and undermine the integrity of the federal judiciary, but that campaign is only half of the equation. The other half is focused on bringing some of the nation’s largest law firms to heel.
Deborah Pearlstein, a visiting professor of law and public affairs at Princeton and the director of the university’s Program in Law and Public Policy, wrote for The New York Times, “Of all of the American legal institutions now facing sustained attack, none would seem better positioned to push back against Mr. Trump’s strongman tactics than this class of wealthy and politically connected firms, known collectively as Big Law. Counsel to the world’s most powerful corporations, they are engaged in every sector of the marketplace and central to ensuring that the United States and global economy continue to spin. Yet where many ordinary judges, law school deans and public interest attorneys of both political parties have found the courage to push back against Mr. Trump’s anti-constitutional histrionics, Big Law has largely stayed silent or worse.”
It’s not too late for the firms to put a fight. Whether they want to remains to be seen.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
