How Donald Trump Throttled Big Law

The New Yorker [unpaywalled] – The President has two goals: to seek revenge and to intimidate lawyers challenging his agenda. Is a top firm’s deal with him a necessary act of survival or a damaging blow to the entire profession?…It took the Trump Administration only three weeks to accomplish this subjugation. First, they came for Covington & Burling, the storied Washington firm that had the temerity to represent, pro bono, the former special counsel Jack Smith—“deranged Jack Smith,” in the words of Trump, who has called for Smith to be jailed. An executive order issued on February 25th yanked the security clearance for Smith’s lawyer, the Covington partner Peter Koski, threatening, as Trump well understood, Smith’s constitutional right to counsel; Trump’s own lawyers needed clearances in order to represent him in the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case. The next firm targeted was Perkins Coie, based in Seattle and with a long history of representing Democratic Party entities and candidates. In 2016, as part of its work for the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, the firm commissioned what came to be known as the Steele dossier, an opposition-research report into the then candidate Trump’s ties to Russia. Trump sued Perkins Coie over the Steele dossier, in 2022, and lost, but he is not one to drop a grudge. The Perkins executive order, issued on March 6th, claimed that “the dishonest and dangerous activity of the law firm . . . has affected this country for decades,” and went on to invoke the dossier. The Perkins Coie executive order was far more egregious than the one directed against Covington. It not only suspended security clearances for the firm’s lawyers but also barred Perkins Coie employees from entering government buildings or meeting with government officials “when such access would threaten the national security of or otherwise be inconsistent with the interests of the United States.” Even more draconian, it instructed agencies to terminate contracts held by Perkins Coie clients. “The Order is not just an attempt to constrain or weaken Perkins Coie; its objective is to destroy the Firm,” its lawyers argued in a request for an emergency order suspending most of the edict. “Unless restrained, the Order realistically might succeed in that objective within days.” Perkins Coie’s fifteen highest-billing clients or their affiliates all regularly bid for government contracts. In an affidavit, the partner David Burman said that a major government contractor had already withdrawn its work from Perkins Coie, and that a federal official had informed a client that its Perkins Coie lawyers should not attend a meeting. “The client,” Burman wrote, “after expressing great reluctance and regret, said it was forced to hire other law firms to represent it before the federal government.”…