Thomas Edsall writes in The New York Times:
With Trump back in the White House, each new week produces an onslaught of radical policy initiatives.
In an essay posted on Substack, Stephen
I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described a sequence — running
from Feb. 21 to Feb. 27 — of what are in effect warnings designed to intimidate
and even silence the nation’s legal community.
There is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Friday
night sacking of the senior military lawyers in the Army, Navy, and
Air Force — lawyers who, by law, are required to provide ‘independent legal
advice’ to the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaders. There is President
Trump’s revocation of security clearances for all of the lawyers at Covington
& Burling who were in any way involved in pro bono representation of
Special Counsel Jack Smith once he left government service (and Trump’s ominous
suggestion, captured in the video in which he signed the revocations, that
‘you’re going to do this with more firms, right?’). There is the threat by
interim D.C. U.S. attorney Ed Martin that Covington faces a criminal investigation
for its representation of Smith.”
Vladeck explained the significance of these developments:
What the Trump administration is doing is not just about
specific lawyers representing unpopular clients, but is rather far more
ominous: The administration is acting in ways that will necessarily chill a
growing number of lawyers from participating in any litigation against the
federal government, regardless of who the client is.
That, in turn, will make it harder for many clients adverse
to the Trump administration to find lawyers to represent them — such that at
least some cases either won’t be brought at all or won’t be brought by the
lawyers best situated to bring them.
In addition to revoking the security clearances, Trump wrote
in a Feb. 25 memorandum, “I also direct the Attorney General and
heads of agencies to take such actions as are necessary to terminate any
engagement of Covington & Burling LLP by any agency to the
maximum extent permitted by law and consistent with the memorandum that shall
be issued by the director of the Office of Management and Budget.”
The effects of the Trump administration’s initiatives soon
become apparent. On Feb. 26, Bloomberg reporters Ben Penn and Tatyana Monnay
described some of the reverberations of the Trump edict in “Covington Revenge Deepens Worries of Defending Trump Targets.”
“Some firm leaders,” they wrote, “citing corporate clients
threatening to walk if they get crosswise with Trump, have rejected outright or
put up roadblocks to partners seeking approval to represent D.O.J. lawyers,
F.B.I. agents, and other civil servants who’ve faced various forms of attack.”
Penn and Monnay reported that their sources told them that
Individual attorneys want to enter what they see as a
nonpartisan battle to preserve democracy by filing merit systems complaints for
terminated federal employees, representing Jan. 6 prosecutors under
investigation from D.O.J. and Congress, or participating in litigation to halt
Trump policies. Firms’ senior decision makers, however, agonize about the
sustainability of representing current and former government employees opposite
the administration.
It’s not just the left and the center that finds the
administration’s policies disturbing:
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato
Institute, warned in a Feb. 26 essay, “Trump Punishes Large Law Firm for Representing His Adversary,”
that the president’s actions threaten “the loss of an independent and qualified
bar willing to stand up to authority.”
The implications of the revocation of security clearances,
Olson continued, “go far beyond the practice of national security law. Anyone
can find themselves in a fight with Trump or his allies on almost any topic
under the sun, and the question is whether the counsel representing you in that
dispute has to fear being made the next Covington.”
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