Trump punishes law firm that hired lawyer who investigated him
President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order that punishes yet another law firm because it employed or defended someone he considers an enemy—marking his latest dangerous attack on free speech and the bedrock legal principle that everyone deserves the representation of their choosing.
Tuesday's executive order targets Jenner & Block, a large law firm that employed Andrew Weissmann, a litigator who worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller's team that probed whether Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election.
Directly mentioning Weissmann’s hiring, the executive order suspends security clearances for Jenner & Block attorneys, and orders a review of contracts if companies have hired the firm for legal services.
Jenner & Block isn’t the only law firm Trump has punished.
He’s pulled security clearances for lawyers at Perkins Coie for the crime of “representing failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” and even tried to ban its lawyers from federal buildings. A federal judge, however, quickly blocked that ban, saying that the ban “threatens the very foundation of our legal system.”
“Our justice system is based on the fundamental belief that justice works best when all parties have zealous advocates,” District Judge Beryl Howell said.
Trump also targeted the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which he said committed the crime of “hired unethical attorney Mark Pomerantz, who had previously left Paul Weiss to join the Manhattan District Attorney’s office solely to manufacture a prosecution against me and who, according to his co-workers, unethically led witnesses in ways designed to implicate me.”
Aside from cancelling security clearances held by that firm’s attorney’s, he also sought to target its business by saying the administration would “require Government contractors to disclose any business they do with Paul Weiss and whether that business is related to the subject of the Government contract.”
And earlier this week, Trump issued a chilling memo urging Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek sanctions against lawyers and law firms that file lawsuits against Trump’s illegal actions in court.
“I hereby direct the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters before executive departments and agencies of the United States,” Trump wrote in the memo, citing lawyers who defended Hillary Clinton or challenged Trump’s immigration orders as the kind of actions that warrant sanctions.
Trump's attack on law firms is a backdoor attempt at getting revenge on his enemies. The firms that challenged his actions in court or hired lawyers who probed Trump could face existential financial crises if their work dries up.
It’s also a way of preventing his enemies from getting the representation they want.
And terrifyingly, the orders are having both of those intended effects.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that some law firms are refusing to represent Trump’s enemies, out of fear they will face similar retribution.
From the report:
Biden-era officials said they’re having trouble finding lawyers willing to defend them. The volunteers and small nonprofits forming the ground troops of the legal resistance to Trump administration actions say that the well-resourced law firms that once would have backed them are now steering clear. The result is an extraordinary threat to fundamental constitutional rights of due process and legal representation, they said—and a far weaker effort to challenge Trump’s actions in court than during his first term.
And Paul Weiss made a deal with the devil to try to avoid a punishing financial blow.
The attacks on the legal system have legal experts blaring alarm bells.
“This is the autocratic legal idea of claiming a democratic mandate to attack the rule of law by using law to really erode institutional pillars that are supposed to check executive power,” Scott Cummings, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, told The Washington Post.
“It sends little chills down my spine,” Howell, the judge who blocked part of Trump’s order targeting Perkins Coie, said as she made her ruling.