Trump Is Playing Rope-a-Dope With Elite Law Firms

Mr. Toobin is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.”

The effort by the Trump administration to penalize major law firms descended into black comedy this week. Last year, four judges ruled that the executive orders targeting the firms were unconstitutional, and months ago the Department of Justice announced plans to appeal.

But on Monday, the Justice Department told the court that it was dropping the appeal; then, on Tuesday, the administration lawyers said they wanted to pursue the appeal after all. The about-face was embarrassing, but it obscured a larger truth of this lamentable episode: President Trump had already won this fight months ago, when the American legal profession — especially its largest and richest law firms — lost. And that’s not funny at all.

The story began last March, when the president issued an executive order imposing sanctions on Perkins Coie, including a ban on its lawyers’ even entering federal buildings, as punishment for the firm’s practice of representing Democratic officials and other critics of Mr. Trump. Similar orders followed, targeting three other law firms: Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey.

Hundreds of law firms joined forces and signed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the executive orders were unconstitutional, writing that “those orders pose a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself. The judiciary should act with resolve — now — to ensure that this abuse of executive power ceases.”

But what was most notable about the brief was which firms didn’t sign it in support of Perkins Coie. Faced with this existential challenge to the nature of law practice, many of the biggest firms, including such eminences as Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Sidley Austin, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, preferred to stay silent and leave the defense of their colleagues in the bar to lawyers with less money but more principles.

But worse was to come. When the Trump administration threatened to impose a similar sanction on Paul Weiss, that firm, once a storied name in American law, became the first to surrender to the plainly illegal demands of the administration. After a meeting in the Oval Office with President Trump, Brad Karp, the chair of the firm at the time, decided to grovel and agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono services to the administration as a kind of penalty for its nonexistent wrongdoing.

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Jeffrey Toobin is a former assistant U.S. attorney who writes about the intersection of law and politics. He is the author of “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court,” “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy” and other books.

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