President Trump’s first White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, had tense encounters with the president as he resisted Mr. Trump’s efforts to impede the Russia investigation, emerging as an avatar for people who believed the president needed containing.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, his White House counsel, David Warrington, has so far taken a much milder approach in one of the most important legal jobs in government — a position that historically has straddled a sometimes-murky divide between keeping the president on the right side of the law and finding ways to facilitate presidential desires.
Mr. Warrington, 57, has been at Mr. Trump’s side as the president has made numerous legally aggressive moves — prolifically invoking emergency powers, sending troops into cities, investigating his perceived foes, unilaterally raising import taxes and leveraging concessions from private sector companies.
The pattern raises the question of how such maneuvers have been shaped by the views of Mr. Warrington, who has no previous government experience. In an interview, the White House counsel described his role as informing the president about the legal landscape and providing guidance about potential consequences, including ways to reduce risks — but not making decisions for Mr. Trump.
“He’s the one that makes the ultimate decisions,” Mr. Warrington said, adding: “And whether I have a personal view of something is really, that’s — unless asked for it, I don’t give it.”
If Mr. Warrington has a lighter touch than Mr. McGahn or other past White House counsels, that’s in part because the job itself is different now. There is no special counsel investigation dogging Mr. Trump, as there was in his first term, and the Justice Department’s top ranks are filled with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers. The Supreme Court last year granted presidents substantial immunity from prosecution for official actions.
And even before he won, Mr. Trump’s aides made it clear that they would not bring figures into his second administration who would thwart his agenda, as they believed some of his appointees had done in his first term — and made plans to appoint lawyers who would be more willing to bless aggressive actions.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former senior Justice Department official in the Bush administration, said that it was Mr. Trump’s prerogative to organize how he received legal advice, but traditionally presidents have wanted a significant legal chop at policies to keep them out of trouble.
If Mr. Warrington isn’t pushing back as aggressively as some think he should on the president’s desires, Mr. Goldsmith said, the cause lies less with the lawyer than with Mr. Trump, who “has organized the type of legal advice he wants.”
To those who have tangled with the administration in the courts, the current posture of the counsel’s office is striking. Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued over several administration policies, said his group had lines of communication with White House lawyers during Mr. Trump’s first term. This time around, “it’s clear that there are no adults in the room with the president,” he said.
“There is zero engagement and the forces arguing for restraint and balancing of equities aren’t in the inner circle,” Mr. Romero said. “The results are that a second Trump administration is a lot more unhinged than the first.”
Some of the administration’s most aggressive policy changes have been enacted through Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive directives. Mr. Warrington and his team at the White House Counsel’s Office typically weigh in throughout the process as orders are developed, said several people briefed on the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal dynamics.
When the lawyers have flagged concerns and proposed changes in the name of reducing legal risks, Mr. Warrington and Mr. Trump’s senior aides and policy advisers have usually been able to reach consensus, those people said. On some occasions, they said, the advisers present their differing views to Mr. Trump, who decides whether to proceed.
Mr. Trump’s second term has been distinguished in part by his willingness to test the bounds of his legal authority, leading lower-court judges to block many of his actions. In a major ruling last week, a federal appeals court struck down his invocation of emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs.
But the conservatives on the Supreme Court have so far proven more willing to permit Mr. Trump’s actions, a pattern Mr. Warrington and others on the Trump legal team see as vindication.
During at least one high-stakes moment, Mr. Warrington backed actions that put the administration directly at odds with a court.
When a judge in March ordered the Trump administration to turn around planes carrying migrants who were being abruptly deported to a Salvadoran prison, Stephen Miller, a deputy White House chief of staff and homeland security adviser, was among those who pushed to defy the judge and complete the transfer.
Mr. Warrington and the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, discussed putting forward a legal argument that the order did not apply to migrants aboard planes that had already left American airspace, according to people briefed on the discussions. They decided that the administration had a defensible basis to proceed.
The planes did not turn back. Later, after the judge moved to possibly hold Trump officials in contempt of court, two Trump-appointed appellate judges shut the proceeding down.
The White House and the Justice Department declined to comment on the episode.
This account of Mr. Warrington’s role inside the White House is based on more than a dozen current and former administration officials, friends of Mr. Warrington’s and critics of his performance. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations or not to offend him.
Bearded and solidly built, with a casual style both in appearance and personal demeanor, the White House counsel cuts an unusual figure in the Trump White House.
“Dave is not animated,” said Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s top political advisers. “Dave’s very straight to the point. But Dave also doesn’t lead with the answer, ‘No.’ Instead, it’s, ‘Let’s figure out what is in the art of the possible.’”
Indeed, amid the sometimes prickly personalities that make up Mr. Trump’s advisers, Mr. Warrington’s genial approach has made him popular internally. Statements lauding him were provided by Vice President JD Vance; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser; Mr. Miller, who leads the domestic policy shop through which many executive orders flow; and Susie Wiles, the chief of staff.
“He’s hardworking, loyal, smart and effective,” said Ms. Wiles, calling him a “friend.”
A libertarian bent
Mr. Warrington grew up in Milton, Del., a small town inland from Rehoboth Beach. His father was a World War II army veteran who served two decades in the Air Force, and Mr. Warrington has told friends that he was inspired to join the Marines after reading the World War II memoir “Guadalcanal Diary.” He enlisted out of high school and served for six years, including guarding U.S. embassies in Chad and Israel, and displays the Marine Corps flag in his White House office.
He later enrolled in Georgetown University, where he majored in philosophy and government, and earned a law degree from George Mason University. He spent years doing mostly routine legal work for small law firms, and began to get involved in Republican politics from a libertarian angle.
In 2000, he helped found the National Association for Gun Rights for firearm enthusiasts who thought the National Rifle Association was too moderate, and later represented gun-rights groups. In 2001, he unsuccessfully ran in the Republican primary for a state House seat in Virginia on a platform of lower taxes. He also volunteered for the 2008 presidential campaign of Ron Paul, who served as a Texas representative in Congress, and became a lawyer for Mr. Paul’s 2012 run.
Given libertarians’ hostility to concentrated executive power and heavy-handed federal action, some associates of Mr. Warrington struggle to reconcile his background with how he is now helping a president who has sought to steamroll checks on executive authority. .
Mr. Warrington said his role is to provide counsel to help clients achieve their goals legally, not to choose those goals. “In my work as a lawyer, any differences in the ideological makeup between the past work and present work is immaterial,” he said.
He added, however, that many who had backed Mr. Paul’s White House bids migrated to supporting Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, noting they both opposed foreign interventions.
“Both were critical of the size and role of government,” Mr. Warrington said. “And both were outsiders who pledged to upset the system. They might have different styles and there are some policy differences, but President Trump has been much more successful in putting into action policies that drove folks to support Ron Paul.”
Joining Trumpworld
At the 2012 Republican convention, the campaign of the party nominee, Mitt Romney, sought to challenge some of Mr. Paul’s delegates. Mr. Warrington successfully navigated legal and party rules to defend the contested seats.
In 2016, when the Trump campaign worried that the Republican establishment would mount a last-ditch effort to get delegates to deny Mr. Trump the nomination at the convention, Mr. McGahn hired Mr. Warrington to help based on that experience.
He returned to private practice, and in 2021, when Mr. Trump was at a low point in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters and few serious lawyers wanted to be associated with him, Mr. Warrington was among those few who would represent him. He also represented more Trump associates called as witnesses by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot than any other lawyer.
And when Mr. Trump became a presidential candidate for a third time, Mr. LaCivita recommended that Mr. Warrington serve as his campaign’s de facto general counsel. In that role, Mr. Warrington successfully helped fend off efforts to keep Mr. Trump’s name off ballots under the 14th Amendment’s bar on former insurrectionists holding federal office.
After Mr. Trump won, he tapped Mr. Warrington to join the administration as White House counsel.
In January, when the Republican National Lawyers Association held a lunch in his honor, Mr. Warrington told attendees that he was struck by Mr. Trump’s sophistication about litigation — from suing and being sued over decades and then indicted four times — even though he is not a lawyer, according to people in attendance.
For his part, Mr. Warrington noted in his interview with The Times, he is learning about government from the inside.
“I spent most of my career suing the government, or protecting clients from being sued by the government, so being the government now is a little odd,” Mr. Warrington said.
A running start
In Mr. Trump’s first minute back in power, at 12:01 p.m. on Inauguration Day, Mr. Warrington’s phone buzzed as he watched the swearing-in ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. The new administration had been hit with its first lawsuit: a challenge to Mr. Trump’s plans to empower the billionaire Elon Musk to lead an effort to overhaul the government.
In the months that followed, hundreds more lawsuits came as Mr. Trump challenged one legal limit after another.
Mr. Warrington and his staff work closely with the Justice Department on legal arguments. Under previous administrations, Mr. Warrington said, the office “hadn’t really been set up to do litigation or a litigation focus.”
Now, he said, “we are a litigation-heavy shop.” At the same time, he insisted: “We’re not built to be just a cleanup operation.”
Earlier in the year, when a string of lower-court rulings blocked administration actions, Mr. Trump expressed exasperation with his staff, according to people familiar with his reaction. But as Trump-appointed judges on higher courts have intervened to permit Mr. Trump to do more of what he wants, his mood has improved, they said.
“I don’t know of any lawyer who has any template for the legal operation of this White House, just because of how aggressive this president wants to be in pressing his executive authority to the limit,” said Lee Goodman, who worked with the 2012 Paul campaign and is president of the Republican National Lawyers Association. “But so far, he has largely been winning.”
Mr. Warrington declined to discuss internal deliberations about the administration’s strategy. But, he said, from his experiences as a Marine, he was not afraid to speak up if he saw something he did not like or thought could be improved.
“A lawyer’s job is to provide advice and counsel,” he said, “and a client may take the advice or disregard it as the client sees fit.”
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941
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