Just after 11 a.m. on Oct. 6, a voice of the Trump resistance filled Courtroom 21 of the federal district courthouse in Washington, D.C.
Beth Wilkinson, a prominent trial lawyer, was speaking before a judge on behalf of Disney and its ABC network against what she said was a brazen attempt by the Trump administration to hobble a free press: an unscheduled review of ABC’s broadcasting licenses that could eventually force its eight directly owned stations off the air. The network regarded the review as payback for its critical programming, especially jokes by the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that upset President Trump.
Ms. Wilkinson argued that the mere threat of lost licenses meant editorial decision makers were strapped to a guillotine, weighing every word with the blade hanging over their necks. She portrayed the president as a kind of mafioso-in-chief intent on using the government to settle grudges and scores. “He now has control of vast regulatory powers that he’s willing to unleash against people or organizations who exercise First Amendment speech that he does not like,” she told the judge.
Ms. Wilkinson’s tone may have been cutting and her metaphors hyperbolic, but she is not exactly a staple of the “no kings” circuit.
A former Justice Department official, Ms. Wilkinson has represented Democratic politicians facing sexual harassment or assault allegations and helped guide Justice Brett Kavanaugh through his messy Supreme Court confirmation fight. She has defended tobacco companies and drugmakers; she helped the National Football League fight concussion-related suits from ex-players and Microsoft defeat a Biden-era antitrust lawsuit.
Earlier this year, the media mogul who controls Paramount, David Ellison, hired her to defend his $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery against an attempt by state attorneys general to derail it. Mr. Ellison’s father, Larry, a founder of Oracle, is close to the Trump administration, which had already blessed the merger.
Ms. Wilkinson is arguably the most influential current example of a venerable type: the Washington lawyer who can operate on both sides of a divide. The type was epitomized by Edward Bennett Williams, who represented both Senator Joe McCarthy, the notorious Communist-hunter, and Hollywood screenwriters accused of Communist activities. Williams later founded the firm Williams & Connolly and famously advised A-listers of both parties. The political agility only cemented his status as one of the wise elders of Washington.
Today, however, the mood has shifted. The differences between parties are no longer merely about policy or even ideology. Democrats say Mr. Trump is destroying free speech, the rule of law and other bedrocks of democracy, while the president’s allies insist deep-state prosecutors and left-wing college professors initiated the assault. The stakes feel existential.
“The only way to switch sides at this point is to become a total apostate,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist who has studied the influence industry in Washington. “If the narrative from Democrats is that Republicans are not only different but evil, and vice versa, that’s a very different set of conflicts.”
Which raises a question for advocates like Beth Wilkinson: Does the Trump era mark the high point of the Washington superlawyer, by underscoring the value of Beltway actors who can toggle between MAGA acolytes and enemies? Or, in an age when each side is more fevered and less tolerant of disloyalty, is the situationally flexible Washington lawyer on the verge of extinction?
Begging Outside Merrick’s Door
A Navy captain’s daughter who attended Princeton on an R.O.T.C. scholarship, Ms. Wilkinson was working in the Justice Department in 1995 on the day of a massive bombing in Oklahoma City. She was eager to work on the case and, when an opportunity arose, rushed to persuade her boss, Merrick Garland, to sign off.
“I sat outside Merrick’s door till he’d see me, begging to go,” she said in an interview. “I would have emptied the trash cans to be on that case.” Despite being the youngest prosecutor at the counsel table, she wound up handling the closing argument for the death-penalty sentencing of the convicted bomber, Timothy McVeigh.
Ms. Wilkinson left government work not long after, figuring she would make a brief stop in private practice to earn some money. A brief stint as general counsel of the troubled mortgage finance company Fannie Mae ended with a minor thud when the government took it over and she and other top executives resigned in 2008. (She arrived after the company’s accounting issues became public.) But she was being hailed by colleagues and clients more often than not, and developing a very specific reputation — as the lawyer a business hires after it decides to fight rather than settle.
To young lawyers who struggled with the ethics of representing corporate defendants, Ms. Wilkinson offered a helpful mental exercise. She would acknowledge the temptation to dismiss clients like tobacco companies as beyond the pale. But she emphasized that many defendants are more complicated than they first appear.
“She said, be open to working on a case you might think is morally reprehensible for some reasons, you might turn out to have a different perspective on them,” recalled Cali Arat, who worked as a summer associate at the firm Paul Weiss, where Ms. Wilkinson was a partner. “I had gone to Macalester College, a liberal school. It was the first time someone presented it that way.”
Ms. Wilkinson had developed a network among Democratic big shots partly through her work at the Justice Department — Mr. Garland later officiated at her marriage to David Gregory, the television journalist — and by 2015 had begun to take on political clients, too. Among them were aides to Hillary Clinton caught up in an F.B.I. investigation of a private email server and a congressional investigation of Benghazi, Libya.
She took the cases with her as she left Paul Weiss to start her own firm the following year. But Ms. Wilkinson was keen to represent more than just Democrats in good standing. She had long admired Williams & Connolly, the politically ambidextrous law firm that rarely turned away a client tainted by scandal. One of the firm’s partners defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings, as well as Mr. Trump during the first-term Russia investigation.
Ms. Wilkinson got her chance to hone that approach a few years later, when Mr. Kavanaugh asked her to help navigate his bumpy Supreme Court confirmation process. Facing accusations of sexual assault or misconduct, Mr. Kavanaugh was the kind of client she might have had to turn away at a large, risk-averse firm.
Now, she could essentially override her colleagues’ misgivings. She called a meeting of the roughly 40 lawyers at the firm and informed them she was taking the job, though she said she wouldn’t force any associate to work on the matter if he or she felt uncomfortable doing so.
“She fundamentally believes, and as a former public defender I’ve always believed, that everyone deserves representation, particularly in the face of government overreach,” said Brian Stekloff, the other named partner at Ms. Wilkinson’s firm.
As a business move, the Kavanaugh episode appeared to be a success. Ms. Wilkinson was all over television news, where potential clients could see that she was a relentless advocate, unafraid of controversy. “I think she’s always wanted to take the biggest case of the moment if she can be involved in it,” said Ms. Arat, now a partner at Wilkinson Stekloff. “The Kavanaugh thing was a huge deal.”
But at times, the matter seemed to test her ease at squaring the job with her moral intuitions. After Ms. Wilkinson raised doubts about one Kavanaugh accuser on CNN by questioning why the woman’s lawyer hadn’t reported her allegations to the police, Wolf Blitzer pointed out that women often don’t come forward to report sexual assault because they feel degraded and embarrassed.
Ms. Wilkinson, who had helped found an organization to promote female lawyers, agreed. “It is one of the few good things that’s happened in this country in the last few years — that the Me Too movement has come out and women have been able to speak up,” she responded.
Then she added, “It’s also important that everyone gets a defense, and gets to face those accusations fairly.”
Ms. Wilkinson told me that, “to an outsider, it can look contradictory. But it’s possible for both to be true at the same time.”
Not everyone was persuaded. In late 2019, the firm received a public rebuke of sorts when Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign said it would return a political donation from Ms. Wilkinson and one of her partners. A Buttigieg spokesperson told The Guardian that Mr. Kavanaugh “should have never been put on the Supreme Court, and this campaign will not accept donations from those who played a role in making that happen.”
‘She Doesn’t Have a Problem in Trump World’
This summer Ms. Wilkinson got a call from David Ellison, the tech scion and owner of Paramount, asking if she would work with Mr. Ellison’s parent company on its acquisition of Warner Bros. His company was fighting a coalition of state attorneys general who opposed the deal on antitrust grounds, and the judge seemed sympathetic to some of their claims.
Mr. Ellison and his executives had taken notice of Ms. Wilkinson’s courtroom successes over government lawyers, including a win for Microsoft that cleared the way for its $70 billion purchase of the video game giant Activision Blizzard.
But the case also raised political questions that went beyond mergers and acquisitions. In 2025, Paramount had paid Mr. Trump $16 million to settle what was widely seen as a frivolous lawsuit against “60 Minutes,” which appeared to clinch the administration’s backing for the purchase of the storied media company. It looked to many outside MAGA like a quid pro quo, though Paramount said there was no connection. Mr. Ellison denied having anything to do with the settlement.
Ms. Wilkinson, for her part, looked nothing like an anti-Trump fulminator. “There aren’t many Democrat attorneys who are effective like her,” said Mike Davis, a former Republican Senate aide who helped oversee Mr. Kavanaugh’s nomination process. “She doesn’t have a problem in Trump world — she was so good on Kavanaugh. Other Democrats wouldn’t be able to navigate it.”
Mr. Davis, who runs a firm that helps companies win approval for mergers pending before the administration, among other matters, said he had personally recommended Ms. Wilkinson to corporate clients seeking a trial lawyer. (The Warner Bros. deal ultimately closed this month, after the company settled with the state attorneys general and avoided a trial.)
The bipartisan cred has even prompted some clients to seek out Ms. Wilkinson when they plan to, in effect, plead for mercy with the administration. After the Justice Department began an inquiry into diversity and inclusion practices at the University of Virginia last year, the university’s board hired Ms. Wilkinson to handle its dealings with the school’s president, James Ryan.
Board members believed the university had legal exposure stemming from a lack of compliance with a Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to discuss the case. They worried that the Trump administration would treat the school harshly if Mr. Ryan stayed on. But Mr. Ryan was skeptical that the school had violated the ruling, as he later wrote in a letter to the Faculty Senate.
It fell to Ms. Wilkinson, a graduate of the university’s law school, to pressure Mr. Ryan to leave. In a June phone call that became heated, she “indicated that the board might even try to fire me for cause if I did not resign,” Mr. Ryan wrote in his letter. He stepped down soon after.
Still, Ms. Wilkinson has hardly been a pushover for the Trump administration. She joined other prominent litigators in signing an amicus brief supporting law firms targeted by the White House last year, and criticized firms that made deals with the administration, her old firm Paul Weiss among them. “I don’t think that’s good for what we’re supposed to stand up for, which is fighting the government and fighting for the rule of law,” she told Bloomberg Law.
She is also representing her former boss Merrick Garland, a named defendant in lawsuits brought by pardoned Jan. 6 rioters seeking compensation from the government.
And then there is the lawsuit by Disney, whose general counsel, David Howard, is a friend and recommended hiring her to help spearhead what may be the biggest test of free speech norms under Mr. Trump. At the District Court hearing in October, Ms. Wilkinson criticized the president for “blatant violations” of the Constitution and derided the administration’s legal rationale that it needed to review ABC’s licenses to prompt better cooperation in a diversity and inclusion employment inquiry.
The attempts to intimidate ABC are “threatening not just to ABC but to all of broadcast media,” she told the judge.
Consensus Breakdown
The Trump era may have widened the distance between the warring factions of American politics so much that Ms. Wilkinson and other heirs to Edward Bennett Williams can no longer move easily from one side to the other. “I still believe in that model, where I don’t have to agree with every view that every one of my clients holds,” said Norman Eisen, a former Washington litigator who served as a special counsel to President Barack Obama. “But I understand the views of those who say, ‘Look, in an era of authoritarianism, it’s different.’”
Ms. Wilkinson said in an interview that she had sympathy for companies that had to compromise their principles in order to survive in the Trump era and considered them worthy of representation. Whether she would defend Trump administration officials who may have directly trampled democratic norms, she conceded, she couldn’t say.
The increasingly fraught status of bipartisan fixers and lawyers also reflects the breakdown of an economic and foreign policy consensus that largely held among Washington elites until the first Trump administration, according to Dr. Drutman, the political scientist. The consensus they helped stitch together was not always popular or wise, but it smoothed the way for government action, and its absence helps explain the paralysis that often prevails today. While lawyers like Ms. Wilkinson will probably continue representing clients on both sides of the MAGA divide, Dr. Drutman noted that activists are increasingly trying to choke off this level of promiscuity by demanding purity from lawyers and other middlemen.
And the enforcers appear to be having an effect. Speaking at a conference in March titled “Bending the Knee: How the Legal Establishment and Corporate America Embraced Corruption in the Trump Era,” Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona summed up the mood on the populist left when he argued that lawyers who had collaborated with President Trump or enabled corruption in his administration should be disbarred. Democrats, he added, should blackball them.
The priority is “making sure it’s known that as Democratic senators, these firms that are engaging in this can’t just be hanging out with us as if nothing happened,” Senator Gallego said.
Ms. Wilkinson herself has been on the receiving end of such blowback. In July, a group called the American Economic Liberties Project, which sponsored the “Bending the Knee” conference, took aim at her in a news release about her client Nexstar, an owner of local ABC stations. Critics on the left accuse Nexstar of keeping Jimmy Kimmel off the air for days after ABC lifted his brief suspension over controversial statements in order to cozy up to the Trump administration and win its approval to buy another media company called Tegna. (Nexstar said at the time that it was guided by the sensibilities of the communities it served, “independent of any external influence.”)
After a group of attorneys general accused Nexstar of defying a judicial order to keep the companies separate while they challenged the merger, the American Economic Liberties Project urged the judge to punish executives at Nexstar for violating the order, and to refer Ms. Wilkinson and a colleague for sanctions.
“These are sophisticated actors who know they are actively flouting a judicial order and showing contempt for the court and the rule of law,” a spokesperson for the group said at the time. (Ms. Wilkinson noted in a legal filing that the actions in question were stipulated by Nexstar’s merger agreement and that the company never hid them from public view. Her firm was not sanctioned.)
Asked how Democrats would regard lawyers like Ms. Wilkinson if the party retook the White House in 2028, the group’s executive director, Nidhi Hegde, said some establishment Democrats would most likely praise her defense of ABC against the Trump administration. But, Ms. Hegde said, the case didn’t wash away the stain of her work on behalf of David Ellison and Nexstar.
“If Democrats are serious about actually being a party for working people, then they do really have to take seriously what she’s facilitating with the complete consolidation of media markets,” Ms. Hegde said, alluding to Ms. Wilkinson. “There’s an inherent contradiction in being in lock step with people who facilitate this oligarchy that’s getting more and more powerful.”
John Koblin contributed reporting. Georgia Gee and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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