A federal judge on Friday struck down an executive order signed by President Trump that threatened penalties against the law firm Jenner & Block, which once employed a top attorney who helped investigate the president alongside the team run by Robert S. Mueller III, who was then the special counsel.
It was the second time a federal judge found one of Mr. Trump’s orders targeting elite law firms unconstitutional, after another judge ruled earlier in May that an essentially identical order targeting the firm Perkins Coie appeared retributive and designed to strong-arm the firm into serving the White House. Two other firms — WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey — have asked for similarly decisive rulings in lawsuits they brought.
In March, after a string of similar orders that openly detailed the president’s political grievances and furthered his campaign of retribution, Mr. Trump released an order targeting Jenner & Block, citing its past decision to hire Andrew Weissmann after the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Weissman left the firm in 2021.
The order leveraged the full force of the federal government to curtail Jenner & Block’s business.
In an opinion on Friday, Judge John D. Bates wrote that the orders were “doubly violative of the Constitution.” Not only did they violate the First Amendment by seeking to muzzle a perceived critic of the president, he wrote, they also had the effect of intimidating all other lawyers whose work “protects against governmental viewpoint becoming government-imposed orthodoxy.”
“This case arises from one of a series of executive orders targeting law firms that, in one way or another, did not bow to the current presidential administration’s political orthodoxy,” he wrote. “Like the others in the series, this order — which takes aim at the global law firm Jenner & Block — makes no bones about why it chose its target: it picked Jenner because of the causes Jenner champions, the clients Jenner represents, and a lawyer Jenner once employed.”
The order had directed federal agencies to identify and cancel contracts with the firm, suspend security clearances held by its lawyers and bar its staff from federal buildings, all in the name of “national security and other interests of the United States.”
Around the same time that Mr. Trump began releasing the orders, a cluster of other top firms rushed to pre-emptively head off retaliation by offering millions of dollars of pro bono work on areas of common ground, where they said the values of the firm and the White House appeared to align.
Between white shoe firms such as Paul Weiss, Skadden, Latham & Watkins and half a dozen others, the White House secured pledges approaching $1 billion worth of free work.
But a minority of firms, including Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey and WilmerHale, went in the opposite direction and sued to stop the orders, arguing that they were clearly coercive. In court, lawyers pointed out that the moment other firms cut deals, the grave national security concerns cited in the executive orders abruptly vanished.
With Judge Bates’s order on Friday, federal judges have so far agreed.
Permanently barring the government from enforcing the order, Judge Bates noted that the larger legal profession now faced a “forward-looking censorship scheme,” in which the threat of punishment could be trotted out repeatedly, any time any firm appeared to be resisting Mr. Trump’s political agenda.
“The administration has shown a repeated willingness to haggle, sending the message loud and clear that Jenner can spare itself — if it compromises its speech,” Judge Bates wrote. “So whereas retaliation usually punishes once and moves along, the retaliation here is ongoing and avoidable.”
Last week, Jenner & Block’s lawyers notified the court that despite the lawsuit challenging the terms of the executive order, several of its lawyers had since received letters informing them that their security clearances were being suspended anyway.
At the same time, firms that reached a deal have seen the scope of their agreements broaden, as Mr. Trump has reportedly mused about deploying those firms toward political causes such as renegotiating trade deals.
While Jenner & Block had asked Judge Bates to go beyond striking down the executive order and also block any future actions that could arise from the president’s attacks, Judge Bates declined to do so.
Noting that he was “very sympathetic” and even found it plausible that the government would retaliate again given its continual hounding of the firm during the litigation, he wrote that it was beyond the court’s power to halt “hypothetical future actions,” even if they were likely unconstitutional follow-up attacks.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts.
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