Heading into last week, Donald Trump’s unprecedented campaign against the legal profession focused on eight prominent law firms. On Wednesday, the president added a ninth, and while doing so, he noted in passing that his target list included five additional firms, which he did not identify.
The public didn’t have to wait too long for an answer to that question. The New York Times reported:
Five more prominent law firms facing potential punitive action by President Trump reached deals on Friday with the White House to provide a total of $600 million in free legal services to causes supported by the president. Four of the firms — Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett — each agreed to provide $125 million in pro bono or free legal work, according to Mr. Trump. A fifth firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, agreed to provide at least $100 million in pro bono work.
Taken together, several giants from “Big Law” have committed to nearly $1 billion in free legal services — despite the inconvenient fact that none of the firms has been credibly accused of wrongdoing. In fact, the president has conceded that the firms have “done nothing wrong,” but he’s targeting them anyway as part of a damaging and authoritarian-style attack.
Other firms appear far less eager to roll over. Indeed, on the same afternoon in which Trump announced deals with five more firms, Susman Godfrey, targeted with an executive order days earlier, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the president’s offensive. The Texas-based firm argued that the Republican’s punishments were unconstitutional and “a clear and harmful attempt to discourage law firms and their clients from challenging abuses of government power.”
In a statement, Susman Godfrey said the firm was “duty-bound” to push back against presidential abuse.
“No administration should be allowed to punish lawyers for simply doing their jobs, protecting Americans and their constitutional right to the legal process,” the firm said. “But this goes far beyond law firms and lawyers. Today it is our firm under attack, but tomorrow it could be any of us.”
As things stand, Trump has targeted 14 firms, four of which have fought back in response to presidential orders. Two firms, meanwhile, struck deals with Trump that led him to rescind the punishments he’d already imposed. Another firm that was hit with an order is still weighing its options.
But as of Friday, the other seven firms — half of the overall total — chose pre-emptive appeasement: Members of this septet learned that the president was likely to punish the firm, prompting it to cave before Trump threw a punch.
In case this weren’t unsettling enough, The Wall Street Journal reported on a familiar figure the president has reportedly relied on to reach these agreements — and in a weird twist, he doesn’t work for the White House or the administration in any formal capacity. Trump’s personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn, who has been indicted in Arizona on charges related to Trump’s 2020 election loss, has emerged as the face of the Trump administration’s campaign against large law firms that it views as hostile to the president and his causes, according to lawyers at seven of the firms and White House officials. In a series of meetings and phone calls, Epshteyn has extracted large commitments of pro bono work for Trump-supported causes and changes to the law firms’ hiring practices to Trump’s preferences, the lawyers and officials said.
As firms struck deals with the White House, it stood to reason that they were negotiating with White House officials. While The Wall Street Journal’s report hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, if it’s correct, it suggests that those assumptions were, at a minimum, incomplete — and Trump has instead turned to a controversial member of his private legal team to extract concessions. If that’s the case, it raises a variety of other questions. Indeed, Talking Points Memo published an interesting analysis over the weekend, noting that if the president is making these deals in his personal capacity, it creates a qualitatively different kind of controversy. The Journal’s report added that some of the law firms “privately worried about negotiating with a lawyer who wasn’t employed by the government and didn’t have a government email address.” I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of this.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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