Ray Brescia, MSNBC - “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.
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