For a brief moment, it looked as though the administration might have come to its senses. The Justice Department told the D.C. Circuit in early March that it wanted to drop its appeal defending President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting four major law firms after those firms sued and won. We saw that as a hopeful sign that maybe, just maybe, some sanity was returning to Washington.
But that hope did not last long.
Less than a day later, the Justice Department reversed itself and asked to keep fighting after all. According to the Wall Street Journal, the department’s move to retreat had angered Trump, so he ordered it back onto the case. Bloomberg Law later reported that an administration official described the original dismissal filing as “inadvertent,” one of those wonderfully implausible Washington words that somehow only makes the story stranger. The government then filed its merits brief anyway, and the appeal is set for argument on May 14.
That weird little procedural boomerang would be amusing if the underlying issue were not so serious. But it is. In fact, of all the administration’s current campaigns against institutions that can check presidential power, this one may be the most dangerous and the least appreciated.
Everybody understands, at least instinctively, why it matters when a president threatens the press. People also more or less understand why it matters when he menaces universities, museums, or other cultural institutions. Those are visible targets, and they read as political in an obvious way.
Attacks on law firms land differently. Part of that is because many major firms are hardly natural objects of public sympathy. Most everyday Americans won’t shed many tears for institutions associated with enormous hourly rates, corporate power, and a profession that people tend to joke about until they need a lawyer. Large white-shoe firms can also seem culturally and politically entangled in establishment Washington in ways that prompt some to assume they are just another faction in a power struggle.
But that perception is exactly why this threat is so easy to underestimate. The point is not whether one feels a spontaneous rush of affection for Big Law. The point is that when a government starts punishing lawyers for taking cases it dislikes, it is not merely lashing out at one privileged profession—it chomps down on the basic mechanism by which Americans challenge unlawful government action in the first place.
And here, the retaliatory nature of what Trump did was not especially subtle. In total, six law firms were the targets of presidential orders or memoranda; 20 (including two also targeted by orders) were included in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission probe of hiring practices. Nine firms signed agreements with the administration, promising a total of $1 billion in legal services. Of those nine that signed deals? Two, Willkie Farr and Cadwalader, weren’t targeted at all. They just saw which way the wind was blowing.
The first major target to sue was Perkins Coie. On March 6, 2025, Trump signed an executive order accusing the firm of “dishonest and dangerous activity,” citing its representation of Hillary Clinton in 2016, its role in hiring Fusion GPS (which would in turn commission the Steele dossier), its work with donors (including George Soros) in election-law litigation, and its past DEI-related hiring and fellowship practices. The order then did something extraordinary. It directed agencies to:
- suspend security clearances held by people at the firm pending review;
- identify and cut off government goods and services provided for the firm’s benefit;
- require federal contractors to disclose any business they did with the firm;
- review and potentially terminate contracts touching the firm;
- sharply restrict the firm’s access to federal buildings; and
- discourage agencies from hiring the firm’s employees without a waiver.
The administration also began that broader probe of large law firms’ affirmative-action-style hiring and fellowship programs. Many of these preferential practices were created in an era when such programs were widely embraced, but may now amount to plain-old illegal racial discrimination following the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In that landmark case, a group argued that Harvard’s (and the University of North Carolina’s) “race-conscious” admissions process functionally discriminated against white and Asian applicants. The court agreed, finding the programs did not clearly address a compelling interest, operated on racial stereotypes (by presuming racial groups are monoliths), and were not being time-limited.
A president attacking the press, or universities, or museums is ugly and obvious. A president attacking the bar is different. It is quieter, more structural, and in some ways more insidious, because it goes after the intermediaries who make all the other checks possible.
By that time, every alarm in the legal profession should have been ringing. Then came Jenner & Block. Trump’s March 25 executive order singled out the firm in large part because it had rehired Andrew Weissmann, one of the most prominent prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s special-counsel team that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The order described Weissmann in language that sounded less like constitutional governance and more like an especially aggrieved cable-news chyron. It then imposed essentially the same sanctions: security-clearance review, contract scrutiny, restrictions on access to federal buildings, and instructions to agencies to avoid hiring Jenner personnel absent a waiver.
The order also specifically told officials to limit engagement with Jenner employees, “including but not limited to Andrew Weissmann.” What was the purpose of restating the animus against a specific attorney, other than to underscore the retaliatory nature of the order?
Two days later came WilmerHale, again rooted in Mueller-related rage. Trump’s executive order against WilmerHale complained that the firm had embraced Mueller after what Trump called the “weaponization of government.” Once again, the president directed agencies to suspend clearances and review relationships. The formal language was about national security and administrative discretion. The real message was simpler: Represent or employ people I hate, and the federal government may try to make you radioactive.
Then came Susman Godfrey. Trump’s April 9 executive order accused the firm of “weaponiz[ing] the American legal system” and “degrad[ing] the quality of American elections.” Such language makes sense once you remember that Susman represented Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against Fox News, which ended in Fox’s $787.5 million settlement. The order also attacked Susman over DEI-related practices, including a program offering awards and job opportunities to “students of color,” and then imposed the same package of punitive measures. If the pattern was not clear before, it was impossible to miss by then: The White House had found a template for using executive power to retaliate against firms for clients, causes, and affiliations the president disliked.
To their credit, the district judges who ruled in these cases (now consolidated for appeal) understood what was happening. In case after case, judges concluded that the orders were unconstitutional retaliation. They differed somewhat in emphasis, but the common theme was straightforward: The government cannot use contracting power, security-clearance processes, and access restrictions as a pretext to punish law firms for constitutionally protected advocacy, representation, and association. That is true whether the target is a progressive-identified firm, a conservative shop, or anything in between. The judges also saw something else clearly: These orders were not just aimed at the named firms. They were designed to chill everyone else.
That is the real story here, and it is bigger than the law firms of Perkins, Jenner, WilmerHale, or Susman.
Lawyers are not an optional accessory in a constitutional republic. They make rights enforceable. If a university tramples your free speech rights, if an agency violates due process, if a state retaliates against dissent, if the federal government starts treating opposition as disloyalty—your rights do not leap off the page and defend themselves. You need counsel. You need somebody willing to take your case, file your brief, walk into court, and tell the government, on the record, that it has gone too far.
At bottom, this is not really about Big Law. It is about whether Americans are still allowed to hire lawyers to oppose their own government without those lawyers being punished for taking the case.
Trump’s orders raise the price of that resistance. Not by openly abolishing judicial review, but by attempting something more insidious: Keep the courts formally open while intimidating the lawyers needed to use them. Threaten their clearances. Threaten their clients’ contracts. Threaten their access to federal buildings. Suggest that representing the wrong client, hiring the wrong former official, or prevailing in the wrong politically loaded lawsuit might bring the whole apparatus of the executive branch down on your head.
For organizations like FIRE, that matters in a very practical way. We sue the government. We walk side-by-side with our clients into federal buildings. We rely on being able to represent people and causes without being treated as enemies of the state. Being told, in effect, that legal opposition can carry professional sanctions would be more than “somewhat of an inconvenience.” It would be an attempt to rig the conditions under which constitutional rights can be vindicated at all.
And that is why this threat is so much worse than many people realize.
A president attacking the press, or universities, or museums is ugly and obvious. A president attacking the bar is different. It is quieter, more structural, and in some ways more insidious, because it goes after the intermediaries who make all the other checks possible. If you can scare firms away from unpopular clients, controversial causes, or politically risky cases, you do not have to win every censorship fight, every due process fight, every separation-of-powers fight. You can simply make fewer of those fights happen.
The administration’s defense, meanwhile, amounts to a kind of constitutional shell game.
The government keeps returning to the same talking points: presidential control over national security, broad discretion over security clearances, broad discretion over contracting, broad discretion over access to federal buildings. Fine. Presidents do have real authority in those areas. But discretion is not immunity, and “national security” is not a magic phrase that dissolves the First Amendment whenever uttered with sufficient solemnity. Courts generally defer to genuine security judgments; they do not have to pretend that retaliation has become lawful merely because it has been stapled to a clearance form.
At bottom, this is not really about Big Law. It is about whether Americans are still allowed to hire lawyers to oppose their own government without those lawyers being punished for taking the case. Once that principle goes, our rights won’t matter much, because enforceability is what distinguishes rights from aspirations.
That is why this story should chill anyone, left, right, or otherwise. If the government can punish lawyers simply for opposing the administration in court, then it is not just threatening a profession. It threatens the right of all of us to defend ourselves, to dissent, and to place any meaningful check at all on executive power. It attacks what makes America great—the rule of law.
