“We have a lot of law firms that we’re going to be going after,” President Donald Trump told Fox News on Sunday, “because they were very dishonest people.” His administration has already singled out two large law firms, Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling, for retribution.
Last week, the president issued an executive order that banned the government from hiring Perkins Coie, prohibited working with contractors who use the firm and suspended the security clearances of all its lawyers. That order came two weeks after an order that terminated government agencies’ work with Covington & Burling and suspended security clearances for some of its attorneys.
Trump’s tangles with the legal profession as president go back to the very start of his first administration.
Elite firms like Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling are hardly hotbeds of radicalism. So what offenses, then, have they allegedly committed? Perkins Coie was guilty of “undermining democratic elections” — a reference not to the efforts of Trump’s lawyers after the 2020 presidential election but to the firm’s representation of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election and handling cases to promote voting rights.
As for Covington & Burling, the pretext is even flimsier. Trump retaliated against the firm because it provided legal aid to former special counsel Jack Smith against efforts of the Trump administration to target him.
In response, Perkins Coie has done what many who are challenging the administration’s sweeping efforts against perceived enemies have done: It has lawyered up. This week, Perkins Coie hired another elite law firm — Williams & Connolly — and sued the administration over the executive order.
Trump’s tangles with the legal profession as president go back to the very start of his first administration. One of the earliest acts of his first term was to impose a ban on people from predominantly Arab and Muslim countries seeking to travel to the United States. When this affected people already on their way to the United States, lawyers flocked to airports across the country to provide legal assistance to those who might seek to challenge the ban.
Time and time again in Trump’s first term, lawyers and the legal system stood in the way of many things his administration tried to do. Most notably, they served as a check on the unlawful efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the president’s unconstitutional attempt to remain in power, including the violence of Jan. 6, 2021. That campaign — abetted by a few lawyers but also resisted even by some within his administration — sought to destroy the peaceful transfer of power and served as an egregious and blatant affront to the rule of law.
Particularly heartless is the Trump administration’s attack on lawyers who are engaged in public service.
While Trump was out of power, lawyers secured hundreds of millions of dollars in civil judgments against him, as well as convictions on 34 felony counts from a jury in New York. Throughout these legal proceedings, Trump routinely ranted about the lawyers and judges who were being unfair to him.
In the president’s second term, Trump and allies like Elon Musk have largely taken a proverbial chain saw to much of the government. But in striking back against the legal profession, many of the Trump administration’s actions have been more surgical.
In addition to the actions and threatened actions against private law firms, his supporters have purged the Justice Department of lawyers who worked on Jan. 6 investigation. The department’s leadership directed the firing of anyone who would not take action to withdraw the case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Musk, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and other Republicans have called for the impeachment of judges who have issued rulings against the Trump administration. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed the leading judge advocate general lawyers in the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. Why take that last action? As law professor Rosa Brooks wrote, “It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.”
At least one law school has already drawn fire from one of Trump’s most eager acolytes. Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., told Georgetown University last week that his office would not hire graduates of this top-ranked school until it stopped teaching its students about the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. As Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor noted in his response to Martin, those principles reflect the school’s Jesuit mission and the “Supreme Court has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.”
Particularly heartless is the Trump administration’s attack on lawyers who are engaged in public service, either serving in government or providing free legal assistance to low-income and marginalized communities. One of Trump’s most recent executive orders purports to scale back the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, a popular initiative started during George W. Bush’s administration that provides relatively modest financial support for lawyers who go into public service jobs and earn small fractions of what they could make in private law firms.
In waging this multifront assault, Trump and his allies undoubtedly hoped to cow the legal community. Instead, they are finding, just as they did in their unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election, that members of the legal profession, both inside and outside his administration, are largely refusing to bend to such acts of intimidation. But it will take a concerted effort across all corners of the legal system to continue the resistance to these threats. The entire legal community must remain steadfast in its support of those who hold fast to the rule of law. Remember, lawyers also take an oath to uphold the Constitution, not the whims of a vindictive president.