The Trump administration is abandoning its efforts to sanction law firms viewed by President Trump as his enemies.
The president targeted several law firms last year with a series of executive orders aimed at stripping security clearances, restricting access to federal buildings and directing federal agencies to end contracts with the firms and their clients.
Federal judges found that Trump’s actions against four law firms—Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey—violated the Constitution, blocking the orders and forcing the DOJ to appeal the decisions.
Now, just days before its opening brief in one of the four cases, the Justice Department has abandoned its appeals on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a court filing.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Justice Department for comment. When contacted for comment by Politico, the DOJ referred the outlet to Monday’s filing in which the department moved to voluntarily dismiss the appeals against the four firms. The firms agreed.
The Daily Beast has also reached out to the White House for comment.
One of the president’s initial orders targeted Perkins Coie, a firm with ties to the Democratic Party, citing its work on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and its ties to George Soros as justification.
Trump later announced in a Truth Social post that he was suing the firm “for their egregious and unlawful acts,” specifically one unnamed lawyer employed by the firm. He also complained that the judge presiding over the case was “a highly biased an unfair disaster” who suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
He then moved on to several other firms, including Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Susman Godfrey and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind. While four of the firms challenged the orders, Paul Weiss opted to settle, agreeing to provide $40 million of free work to White House-approved initiatives. Eight other firms followed suit, making similar deals with the Trump administration and facing significant backlash from both within the legal industry and outside it.
In a statement to Politico, Jenner & Block said, “The government’s decision to withdraw its appeals make permanent the rulings of four federal judges that the executive orders targeting law firms, including Jenner & Block, were unconstitutional.”
Susman Godfrey also told the outlet, “The government has capitulated, which is a fitting end to its plainly unconstitutional attack on Susman Godfrey and the rule of law.”
In addition to the challenges to the orders brought by the firms themselves, the American Bar Association filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in June over what it dubbed Trump’s “Law Firm Intimidation Policy.”
The suit claimed that Trump’s executive orders had caused a “pervasive fear” within the legal community, and as a result, “[M]any attorneys are no longer willing to take on representations that would require suing the federal government,” because “certain kinds of expressions and representations pose a serious risk of making a firm the next target of the President’s unconstitutional Law Firm Orders.”
“The President’s attacks on law firms through the Law Firm Orders are thus not isolated events, but one component of a broader, deliberate policy designed to intimidate and coerce law firms and lawyers to refrain from challenging the President or his Administration in court,” the suit stated.
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