Major law firms have bent the knee to Trump—yet the influential Democratic attorneys who work at them keep collecting lucrative paychecks.
Lauren Egan at The Bulwark:
Money over morality
THE FRUSTRATION THAT DEMOCRATIC OFFICIALS have felt as some of the country’s most prestigious law firms have cut deals with Donald Trump to avoid his retribution is quickly morphing into anger that top Democrats at these firms won’t quit in protest.
That anger has been directed at a cadre of individuals, including former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, as well as recent second gentleman Doug Emhoff—all of whom continue to hold posts at firms that have cut deals with the White House. Democrats argue that their refusal to leave those cushy posts is an act of selfishness that has undercut the party’s argument that the country is facing an existential crisis and that institutions and their leaders must be compelled to stand up to Trumpism.
“I think people of principles should quit these law firms,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former senior official in the Biden White House.
“If you are a lawyer who makes $20 million a year, I appreciate the sacrifice that you might make less money because you might lose some clients. But how do you look at yourself?,” said Tanden, who once worked at one of the firms (Paul, Weiss) that settled with Trump. “Everyone’s grandchildren are going to ask them what they did in this moment. What were you doing? People have to look at them with a straight face and ask what they did. Signing off on a $40 million or $100 million payout strikes me as pretty pathetic.”
The ire directed at big-name lawyers for not resigning from their firms is the latest fissure to erupt inside Democratic circles over what type of protest this moment calls for. Only in this case it’s not about whether Joe Biden should drop out in order to save democracy or whether Sen. Chuck Schumer should support a Republican funding bill to avoid a government shutdown. It’s about whether party leadership can continue to preach to voters about the importance of fighting fascism—all while some prominent figures in the party refuse to trade a multimillion-dollar annual paycheck for a not-quite-as-comfortable (but still multimillion!) paycheck at a firm not kowtowing to Trump.
“Make no mistake: Any Paul Weiss lawyer who leaves now, or soon, will not only be blameless but celebrated for standing on principle. But those who choose to stay and make peace with this betrayal of democracy will either be fools—for thinking this will pass—or cowards—for accepting their firm’s role in undermining the legal profession,” Marc Elias, the prominent Democratic lawyer, wrote this week in his Democracy Docket newsletter.
Polls show Democratic voters are frustrated with party leadership. They feel like Democratic leaders’ actions are too often disconnected from their rhetoric about the existential stakes for democracy: that they’ve been talking the talk but not walking the walk. And they’ve watched in horror as institutions they once thought were philosophically aligned with them (including academia and Big Law) have, instead, maneuvered to avoid Trump’s ire rather than confront it.
Willkie Farr & Gallagher, where Emhoff works, recently agreed to a deal with Trump to end its diversity programs and provide $100 million in legal services to the White House to “represent the full political spectrum, including Conservative ideals,” according to a Truth Social post from the president. Paul, Weiss—home to Johnson, Lynch, and Karen Dunn, who led Kamala Harris’s debate preparation for her matchup against Trump—similarly agreed to $40 million in pro bono legal work that Trump said in an executive order would support “veterans, fairness in the justice system, and combating anti-Semitism; and other similar initiatives.” And just this week, Milbank LLP, where Neal Katyal, acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, is a partner, agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono work to causes supported by Trump.
None of those principals has resigned, even though they had previously encouraged Democrats to take strong moral stands against Trumpism. Katyal is a fierce and frequent cable-news Trump critic. Johnson urged those in the legal profession to fight against rising authoritarianism in the weeks before the election. Lynch also warned in the leadup to the election that Trump threatened the future of democracy.
“The whole episode is just as pathetic as it is dangerous. We’re going to be paying for the cowardice of these law firms for years,” said a Democratic strategist. “It’s a time for choosing, and we need the firms to feel internal pressure for their gutlessness. I don’t see how anyone who cares about the basic foundations of democracy could stay on at any of these places.”
The pressure to resign may be most acutely felt for Emhoff, in part because of his wife’s future political ambitions. Harris is reportedly looking at a run for governor in California. And Democratic strategists in the state said Emhoff’s continued presence at Willkie could complicate matters if it persists into 2026. He will almost certainly be peppered with questions about the pro bono cases his firm takes up on behalf of the Trump administration and be repeatedly asked if he feels like he has a responsibility to publicly resist Trump’s shakedown of the legal community.
[...]
PRIVATELY, TOP OFFICIALS AT THESE FIRMS argue that the anger being directed at them is overblown. They insist that they have given up relatively little in exchange for Trump not entirely decimating their practices, as they believe his executive orders would have done. Several have argued that the threat of the president’s actions had a chilling effect on their business, and that competing firms were already trying to poach clients by using Trump’s executive order as leverage.
But the legal community, writ large, has widely agreed that Trump’s actions are blatantly illegal. They’ve noted that law firms that have challenged Trump’s actions in court have been successful. In an attempt to demonstrate some resolve, more than 500 law firms signed on to an amicus brief on Friday in support of Perkins Coie—one of the firms targeted by the Trump administration.
Still, as long as prominent Democratic figures keep their comfortable perches in law firms that have acceded to Trump, nagging questions will remain.
Time for Democrats at Trump-coddling law firms to take a stand and leave.
Hallan sin vida a periodista que expuso una reunión secreta de Bill Clinton con Loretta Lynch -
Hallan sin vida a periodista que expuso una reunión secreta de Bill Clinton con Loretta Lynch –
Por Redacción ZoePost. Continúan las extrañas muertes en torno a esta pareja diabólica.
Origen: Hallan sin vida a periodista que expuso una reunión secreta de Bill Clinton con Loretta Lynch –
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was at the center of the Russian collusion hoax. The FBI spied on the Trump campaign during his time running the Justice Department.
**Must watch Video** Things are about to get interesting.
We all remember the first time this meeting was reported in the news. However, the story never seemed to make any sense or even sound true.
Did Ex-President Clinton accidentally meet with Obama Administration AG Loretta Lynch on that tarmac and chat about grandchildren and golf? Or was this a pre-planned meeting to discuss Hillary Clinton’s missing emails?
Democracy dies when the press is intimidated and the judicial system is cowed. It has happened in Eastern Europe, and it is happening in the United States.
In the time-honored tradition of Machiavellian statecraft, all of the charges being leveled against Donald Trump to remove him from office –
In the time-honored tradition of Machiavellian statecraft, all of the charges being leveled against Donald Trump to remove him from office – namely, ‘abuse of power’ and ‘obstruction of congress’ –are essentially the same things the Democratic Party has been guilty of for nearly half a decade: abusing their powers in a non-stop attack on the executive branch. Is the reason because they desperately need a ‘get out of jail free’ card?
Due to the non-stop action in Washington of late, few believe that the present state of affairs between the Democrats and Donald Trump are exclusively due to a telephone call between the US leader and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That is only scratching the surface of a story that is practically boundless.
Back in April 2016, before Trump had become the Republican presidential nominee, talk of impeachment was already in the air.
“Donald Trump isn’t even the Republican nominee yet,” wrote Darren Samuelsohn in Politico. Yet impeachment, he noted, is “already on the lips of pundits, newspaper editorials, constitutional scholars, and even a few members of Congress.”
The timing of Samuelsohn’s article is not a little astonishing given what the Department of Justice (DOJ) had discovered just one month earlier.
In March 2016, the DOJ found that “the FBI had been employing outside contractors who had access to raw Section 702 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) data, and retained that access after their work for the FBI was completed,” as Jeff Carlson reported in The Epoch Times.
That sort of foreign access to sensitive data is highly improper and was the result of “deliberate decision-making,” according to the findings of an April 2017 FISA court ruling (footnote 69).
On April 18, 2016, then-National Security Agency (NSA) Director Adm. Mike Rogers directed the NSA’s Office of Compliance to terminate all FBI outside-contractor access. Later, on Oct. 21, 2016, the FBI and the DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD), and despite they were aware of Rogers’s actions, moved ahead anyways with a request for a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The request was approved by the FISA court, which, apparently, was still in the dark about the violations.
On Oct. 26, following approval of the warrant against Page, Rogers went to the FISA court to inform them of the FBI’s non-compliance with the rules. Was it just a coincidence that at exactly this time, the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter were suddenly calling for Roger’s removal? The request was eventually rejected. The next month, in mid-November 2016 Rogers, without first notifying his superiors, flew to New York where he had a private meeting with Trump at Trump Towers.
According to the New York Times, the meeting – the details of which were never publicly divulged, but may be guessed at – “caused consternation at senior levels of the administration.”
Democratic obstruction of justice?
Then CIA Director John Brennan, dismayed about a few meetings Trump officials had with the Russians, helped to kick-start the FBI investigation over ‘Russian collusion.’ Notably, these Trump-Russia meetings occurred in December 2016, as the incoming administration was in the difficult transition period to enter the White House. The Democrats made sure they made that transition as ugly as possible.
Although it is perfectly normal for an incoming government to meet with foreign heads of state at this critical juncture, a meeting at Trump Tower between Michael Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser and former Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, was portrayed as some kind of cloak and dagger scene borrowed from a John le Carré thriller.
Brennan questioning the motives behind high-level meetings between the Trump team and some Russians is strange given that the lame duck Obama administration was in the process of redialing US-Russia relations back to the Cold War days, all based on the debunked claim that Moscow handed Trump the White House on a silver platter.
In late December 2016, after Trump had already won the election, Obama slapped Russia with punitive sanctions, expelled 35 Russian diplomats and closed down two Russian facilities. Since part of Trump’s campaign platform was to mend relations with Moscow, would it not seem logical that the incoming administration would be in damage-control, doing whatever necessary to prevent relations between the world’s premier nuclear powers from degrading even more?
So if it wasn’t ‘Russian collusion’ that motivated the Democrats into action, what was it?
From Benghazi to Seth Rich
Here we must pause and remind ourselves about the unenviable situation regarding Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, who was being grilled daily over her use of a private computer to communicate sensitive documents via email. In all likelihood, the incident would have dropped from the radar had it not been for the deadly 2012 Benghazi attacks on a US compound.
In the course of a House Select Committee investigation into the circumstances surrounding the attacks, which resulted in the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other US personnel, Clinton handed over some 30,000 emails, while reportedly deleting 32,000 deemed to be of a “personal nature”. Those emails remain unaccounted for to this day.
Hillary Clinton
✔
@HillaryClinton
I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.
9,394
9:35 PM - Mar 4, 2015
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By March 2015, even the traditionally tepid media was baring its baby fangs, relentlessly pursuing Clinton over the email question. Since Clinton never made a secret of her presidential ambitions, even political allies were piling on. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), for example, said it’s time for Clinton “to step up” and explain herself, adding that “silence is going to hurt her.”
On July 24, 2015, The New York Times published a front-page story with the headline “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Clinton’s Use of Email.” Later, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post candidly summed up Clinton’s rapidly deteriorating status with elections fast approaching: “Democrats still show no sign they are willing to abandon Clinton. Instead, they seem to be heading into the 2016 election with a deeply flawed candidate schlepping around plenty of baggage — the details of which are not yet known.”
Moving into 2016, things began to look increasingly complicated for the Democratic front-runner. On March 16, 2016, WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30 thousand emails and attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547-page treasure trove spans the dates from June 30, 2010 to August 12, 2014.
In May, about one month after Clinton had officially announced her candidacy for the US presidency, the State Department’s inspector general released an 83-page report that was highly critical of Clinton’s email practices, concluding that Clinton failed to seek legal approval for her use of a private server.
“At a minimum,” the report determined, “Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”
The following month brought more bad news for Clinton and her presidential hopes after it was reported that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, had a 30-minute tête-à-tête with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, whose department was leading the Clinton investigations, on the tarmac at Phoenix International Airport. Lynch said Clinton decided to pay her an impromptu visit where the two discussed “his grandchildren and his travels and things like that.” Republicans, however, certainly weren’t buying the story as the encounter came as the FBI was preparing to file its recommendation to the Justice Department.
The summer of 2016, however, was just heating up.
David Axelrod
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@davidaxelrod
I take @LorettaLynch & @billclinton at their word that their convo in Phoenix didn't touch on probe. But foolish to create such optics.
575
5:19 AM - Jun 30, 2016 · Chicago, IL
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Hack versus Leak?
On the early morning of July 10, Seth Rich, the director of voter expansion for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was gunned down on the street in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, DC. Rich’s murder, said to be the result of a botched robbery, bucked the homicide trend in the area for that particular period; murders rates for the first six months of 2016 were down about 50 percent from the same period in the previous year.
In any case, the story gets much stranger. Just five days earlier, on July 5th, the computers at the DNC were compromised, purportedly by an online persona with the moniker “Guccifer 2.0” at the behest of Russian intelligence. This is where the story of “Russian hacking” first gained popularity. Not everyone, however, was buying the explanation.
In July 2017, a group of former U.S. intelligence officers, including NSA specialists, who call themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) sent a memo to President Trump that challenged a January intelligence assessment that expressed “high confidence” that the Russians had organized an “influence campaign” to harm Hillary Clinton’s “electability,” as if she wasn’t capable of that without Kremlin support.
“Forensic studies of ‘Russian hacking’ into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer,” the memo states (The memo’s conclusions were based on analyses of metadata provided by the online persona Guccifer 2.0, who took credit for the alleged hack). “Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack.”
In other words, according to VIPS, the compromise of the DNC computers was the result of an internal leak, not an external hack.
At this point, however, it needs mentioned that the VIPS memo has sparked dissenting views among its members. Several analysts within the group have spoken out against its findings, and that internal debate can be read here. Thus, it would seem there is no ‘smoking gun,’ as of yet, to prove that the DNC was not hacked by an external entity. At the same time, the murder of Seth Rich continues to remain an unsolved “botched robbery,” according to investigators. Meanwhile, the one person who may hold the key to the mystery, Julian Assange, is said to be withering away Belmarsh Prison, a high-security London jail, where he is awaiting a February court hearing that will decide whether he will be extradited to the United States where he 18 charges.
Here is a question to ponder: If you were Julian Assange, and you knew you were going to be extradited to the United States, who would you rather be the sitting president in charge of your fate, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? Think twice before answering.
“Because you’d be in jail”
On October 9, 2016, in the second televised presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Trump accused his Democratic opponent of deleting 33,000 emails, while adding that he would get a “special prosecutor and we’re going to look into it…” To this, Clinton said “it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” to which Trump deadpanned, without missing a beat, “because you’d be in jail.”
Now if that remark didn’t get the attention of high-ranking Democratic officials, perhaps Trump’s comments at a Virginia rally days later, when he promised to “drain the swamp,” made folks sit up and take notice.
At this point the leaks, hacks and everything in between were already coming fast and furious. On October 7, John Podesta, Clinton’s presidential campaign manager, had his personal Gmail account hacked, thereby releasing a torrent of inside secrets, including how Donna Brazile, then a CNN commentator, had fed Clinton debate questions. But of course the crimes did not matter to the mendacious media, only the identity of the alleged messenger, which of course was ‘Russia.’
By now, the only thing more incredible than the dirt being produced on Clinton was the fact that she was still in the presidential race, and even slated to win by a wide margin. But perhaps her biggest setback came when authorities, investigating Anthony Weiner’s abused laptop into illicit text messages he sent to a 15-year-old girl, stumbled upon thousands of email messages from Hillary Clinton.
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Now Comey had to backpedal on his conclusion in July that although Clinton was “extremely careless” in her use of her electronic devices, no criminal charges would be forthcoming. He announced an 11th hour investigation, just days before the election. Although Clinton was also cleared in this case, observers never forgave Comey for his actions, arguing they cost Clinton the White House.
Now James Comey is back in the spotlight as one of the main characters in the Barr-Durham investigation, which is examining largely out of the spotlight the origins of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that dogged the White House for four long years.
In early December, Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, released the 400-page IG report that revealed a long list of omissions, mistakes and inconsistencies in the FBI’s applications for FISA warrants to conduct surveillance on Carter Page. Although the report was damning, both Barr and Durham noted it did not go far enough because Horowitz did not have the access that Durham has to intelligence agency sources, as well as overseas contacts that Barr provided to him.
With AG report due for release in early spring, needless to say some Democrats are very nervous as to its finding. So nervous, in fact, that they might just be willing to go to the extreme of removing a sitting president to avoid its conclusions.
Whatever the verdict, 2020 promises to be one very interesting year.
