(DCNF)—Lawyers who faced professional penalties for standing by President Donald Trump can’t help but view objections of law firms targeted by executive orders as hypocritical.
Those now positioning themselves as defenders of the legal system did nothing when Trump-allied attorneys were losing their law licenses and major firms were refusing to back the president, conservative supporters of Trump’s efforts say.
“Their silence in the face of the same conduct over the past 4 years against lawyers (including me) who represented President Trump is deafening,” John Eastman told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Following an order in February stripping security clearances from attorneys at Covington & Burling, the firm representing former special counsel Jack Smith, Trump fired off a series of orders limiting some of the nation’s top law firms’ access to government contracts and buildings.
Three firms targeted by executive orders, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block, have opted to fight back in court. Other firms — among them Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; Milbank; and Paul Weiss — struck deals with the administration to provide millions in pro bono legal services and avoid diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.
Eastman, who faced disbarment proceedings in California for aiding Trump’s effort challenge the 2020 election results, is unsure whether Trump’s orders will be upheld but finds it fascinating that “law firms and blue state AGs are weighing in screaming about how improper it is to target lawyers because of their representation of clients unpopular with the administration.” He is currently appealing last year’s California State Bar recommendation that he be disbarred.
“In my view, the only way to defeat the lawfare and weaponization of the last 4 years is to apply it on a reciprocal [basis] so that the perpetrators of that lawfare feel the heat now that the [shoe] is on the other foot,” Eastman told the DCNF. “Much like the Independent Prosecutor statute, which was weaponized against the Reagan Administration, went the way of the dodo bird once it was turned on the Clinton Administration.”
Big Law, Big Lib
Support for left-wing causes in “Big Law” firms is pervasive. A 2024 study by Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller found that 95% of pro bono amicus briefs filed by Big Law firms on issues of highest salience like abortion or LGBTQ issues took the liberal side, while 64% of the total 851 briefs analyzed supported the liberal position.
Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho made a similar observation in a March concurrence, writing that judges “shouldn’t be surprised when ‘topflight’ firms consistently jump in on only one side of politically charged disputes.”
Some of Trump’s legal allies see the orders as a smart way to right the ship — or at least save it from sinking into a complete ideological takeover.
“Thank goodness for Trump, who saw that in just the span of 20 years, BigLaw had become so monolithic and dominated by the Left that he had to take some action to push back on these firms,” Jeff Clark, a former DOJ official who Trump recently selected to run the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), wrote on X. “Allowing the trend to continue threatens liberty because the best legal know-how and resources are only put only on one side, accelerating a leftist political monopoly that would have destroyed the country and made it unrecognizable if it had not been halted.”
Clark was named a defendant in the now-doomed case brought against Trump by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was disqualified from prosecuting it in December due to her romantic relationship with a special prosecutor she appointed. The D.C. Bar disciplinary panel also recommended suspending his law license in August.
During the 2020 election, Trump was “starved of BigLaw support while Biden had his pick of the litter,” Clark noted on X.
“In just 20 years — from 2000 when BigLaw firm Gibson Dunn represented Bush the younger in Bush v Gore — not a single big firm would step up to try to help President Trump, which is backwards because (putting aside the anomaly of a big polling bounce after 9/11), President Trump is far more popular with ordinary people in larger numbers than Bush 43 ever was,” he wrote.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly a registered Democrat, left his post as partner at the oldest Wall Street law firm in 2023 to defend President Donald Trump in the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Blanche’s former firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, signed a pro bono deal of at least $100 million with the administration on Friday, Trump announced on Truth Social.
Mike Davis, founder of the Article III project, told the DCNF that firms are going to feel the “legal, political and financial consequences” for lawfare against Trump, his aides and allies.
“What client is going to hire a law firm with Trump’s scarlet letter on it?” he said.
‘Making Big Law Great Again’
The pressure is bringing tensions inside and outside firms to a tipping point.
Over 500 firms signed on to an amicus brief filed by former Obama solicitor general Donald Beaton Verrilli Jr. in support of Perkins Coie.
Some law students at top schools are reconsidering offers to work at firms that made deals, with students at Georgetown Law canceling a recruiting event with Skadden Arps, the Wall Street Journal reported.
At Harvard Law School, more than 90 professors signed a letter to students that decried “severe challenges to the rule of law” taking place under the Trump administration.
Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule objected to his colleagues’ letter, writing in an open letter on substack that it “attempts to appropriate a shared ideal and turn it to sectarian ends, implicitly aiming to define anyone who disagrees as an opponent of the rule of law altogether.”
“Where were the letter’s signatories when federal prosecutors took the unprecedented step of bringing dozens of criminal charges against a former president, who also happened to be the leading electoral opponent of the then-incumbent president?” Vermeule questioned. “Where were the signatories when Jeff Clark, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and other lawyers were disbarred or threatened with disbarment, and indeed prosecuted, for their representation of President Trump? Was this not a threat to the rule of law? Where were the signatories when radical activists menaced Supreme Court Justices in their homes, or when a mob hammered on the doors of the Supreme Court itself?”
White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the DCNF that Trump is “Making Big Law Great Again.”
“Instead of using their power and influence to make our country dangerous and less free, Big Law is working to use its access to the federal government for good,” he said. “This is only possible because of the swift leadership of President Trump to hold Big Law accountable.”
Some conservatives see things differently. Paul Clement, solicitor general under George W. Bush, is representing WilmerHale in its lawsuit against the administration.
“It’s especially admirable of Paul Clement to be standing up for BigLaw when BigLaw didn’t have the courage to stand up for him,” conservative legal scholar Ed Whelan wrote on X.
Clement resigned from King & Spalding in 2011 after it declined to back House Republicans’ litigation over the Defense of Marriage Act and left Kirkland & Ellis in 2022 after it stopped representing clients in Second Amendment cases.
WilmerHale’s lawsuit states that it is “a core principle of our legal system that ‘one should not be penalized for merely defending or prosecuting a lawsuit.’”
“In an unprecedented assault on that bedrock principle, the President has issued multiple executive orders in recent weeks targeting law firms and their employees as an undisguised form of retaliation for representing clients and causes he disfavors or employing lawyers he dislikes,” it continues.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the DCNF there is “no First Amendment right to a security clearance.”
“There is also no constitutional right to a government contract, especially when, as here, the president says that the firm engages in racial discrimination in its hiring and personnel policies, a violation of federal law,” he said.
Trump’s law firm deals are just one way the administration is taking on the legal establishment.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas requested information about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) employment practices from 20 law firms in March. “No one is above the law—and certainly not the private bar,” she said in a statement.
Attorney General Pam Bondi Bondi wrote a letter to the American Bar Association (ABA) in February over diversity requirements in its accreditation standards for law schools, threatening to revoke its “privilege” as the sole accrediting body.
The DOJ restricted its attorneys on Wednesday from attending or speaking at ABA events.
“The ABA is free to litigate in support of activist causes, including by inserting itself into pending litigation as an amicus curiae,” Blanche wrote in a memo. “The Department of Justice must, consistent with the Constitution, be careful stewards of the public fisc, represent all Americans regardless of ideology or political preferences, and defend the policies chosen by America’s democratically elected leadership-as reflected in Congressionally enacted statutes and Presidential policy choices.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) did not respond to a request for comment.
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