Trump ramps ups retribution campaign against legal community

Donald Trump expanded his retribution campaign against law firms on Friday night as he ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to refer what she determined to be partisan lawsuits to the White House and recommend punitive actions that could cripple the firms involved.

The directives were outlined in a sweeping memo in which Trump alleged that too many law firms were filing frivolous claims designed to cause delays. It came after a week of setbacks, in which a slew of judges issued temporary injunctions blocking the implementation of Trump’s agenda.

Trump’s memo directed Bondi to seek sanctions against the firms or disciplinary actions against the lawyers. But imposing sanctions are up to federal judges, and perhaps in recognition of the uncertainty that his attorney general would prevail, Trump also ordered referrals to the White House.

“When the attorney general determines that conduct by an attorney or law firm in litigation against the federal government warrants seeking sanctions or other disciplinary action, the attorney general shall … recommend to the president … additional steps that may be taken,” the memo said.

The memo, as a result, created a formal mechanism for Trump to unilaterally decide whether to impose politically charged sanctions through executive orders that strip lawyers of the security clearances they need to perform their jobs or prevent them from working on federal contracts.

Multiple legal experts suggested the memo would theoretically allow Bondi to decide a particular lawsuit that triggered a temporary injunction was causing an unnecessary delay, and refer the firm that filed the suit to face the hobbling effects of a punitive executive order.

That could cause a chilling effect and lead to the volume of litigation against the Trump administration to decline, the experts said. Even if the lawsuits are in fact for a legitimate purpose, there’s fear that their representation could put them in the president’s cross hairs and endanger their legal practice.

Trump also directed Bondi to open a review into the “conduct” of lawyers and their respective law firms in litigation against the federal government reaching back to the start of his first term in 2017 – and recommend whether it warranted additional punitive actions.

The memo comes as Trump in recent weeks has used executive orders targeting law firms to great effect.

Most recently, Trump stripped lawyers at the firm Paul Weiss of holding a security clearance and barred its employees from entering federal government buildings over his long-held complaint about a former partner, Mark Pomerantz, who tried to build a criminal case against him in New York.

The executive order targeting Paul Weiss was nearly identical to an order that punished the firm Perkins Coie over its ties to a lawyer who once worked with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and another aimed at Covington and Burling, which represented former special counsel Jack Smith.

Paul Weiss had its order withdrawn on Thursday after its chair, Brad Karp, offered a series of concessions including offering up criticism of Pomerantz apparently to appease Trump. He committed to providing $40m worth of legal services to causes that Trump has championed.

But Trump has stewed for days, according to people familiar with the matter, over a series of temporary restraining orders that have slowed the implementation of his political agenda and, in one instance, branded Elon Musk’s cost cutting drive as likely unconstitutional.

The case that has aggravated Trump the most has been the challenge in a federal district court in Washington against his use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove hundreds of suspected Venezuelan gang members without due process as he seeks to ramp up deportations.

In that lawsuit, the US district judge James Boasberg ordered the administration to turn around any deportation flights that were in the air and temporarily barred any further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

The case has turned into a headache for the administration, after it failed to recall two flights on the basis that the judge did not replicate his verbal instruction in a written order, leading the judge to effectively open an inquiry into whether the White House flouted a court order.

“You felt that you could disregard it because it wasn’t in the written order. That’s your first argument? The idea that because my written order was pithier so it could be disregarded, that’s one heck of a stretch,” Boasberg said at a recent hearing.

The administration has insisted it did not violate the order, but at the heart of the dispute is the administration’s belief that the judge lacked jurisdiction to hear the case in the first instance, ignoring the reality that federal courts can review whether statutes are properly invoked.

Against that backdrop, as Trump has continued to rail against the injunction itself, the administration has adopted an increasingly combative stance towards Boasberg and said it was considering whether to invoke the rarely used state secrets privilege to stonewall the judge’s inquiry.