(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5699518&forum_id=2:#48780421)

Biden-era officials said they’re having trouble finding lawyers willing to defend them. The volunteers and small nonprofits forming the ground troops of the legal resistance to Trump administration actions say that the well-resourced law firms that once would have backed them are now steering clear. The result is an extraordinary threat to fundamental constitutional rights of due process and legal representation, they said — and a far weaker effort to challenge Trump’s actions in court than during his first term.

Legal scholars say no previous U.S. administration has taken such concerted action against the legal establishment, with Trump’s predecessors in both parties typically respecting the constitutionally enshrined tenet that everyone deserves effective representation in court and that lawyers cannot be targeted simply for the cases and clients they take on.

Trump has used executive orders to target powerful law firms that have challenged him. The orders have sought to strip them of their business by banning their lawyers from government buildings and barring companies who have federal contracts from employing the law firms.

Follow Trump’s first 100 Days

Trump on Friday ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to expand the campaign by sanctioning lawyers who “engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation” against his administration.

Legal scholars say there is little precedent in modern U.S. history for Trump’s actions. But the president is following a playbook from other countries whose leaders have sought to undermine democratic systems and the rule of law, including Russia, Turkey and Hungary. Leaders in those countries have similarly attacked lawyers with the effect of hollowing out a pillar of justice systems to expand their power without violating existing laws. They have successfully used the strategy to blast away their political opposition and any effort to counter their actions through courts.

“The law firms have to behave themselves,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting on Monday. “They behave very badly, very wrongly.”

Trump’s targets say they are feeling the heat.

“It’s scary,” said a former official in the administration of Joe Biden who has been pulled into Trump-era litigation and needed a lawyer as a result. The former official had lined up one pro bono lawyer from a major law firm that, the day after an executive order this month against the heavyweight law firm Perkins Coie, said that it had discovered a conflict of interest and dropped the person as a client.

Five other firms said they had conflicts, the former official said, including one where “the partner called me livid, furious, saying that he’s not sure how much longer he’s going to stay there,” the former official said, “because the leadership didn’t want to take the risk.”

The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further difficulties obtaining a lawyer.

“I don’t know how many people are going to end up having to pay a significant amount of money out of pocket to defend themselves for faithfully and ethically executing their public service jobs,” the person said. “It’s really a wild situation to be in.”

The sweeping campaign is targeting the livelihoods of the people best qualified to contest the legality of Trump’s agenda. Lawyers must now contend with the possibility they would face lawsuits, fines and other punishment aimed at them and even their other clients should they contest Trump administration efforts in court.

“You need the legitimacy of law on your side at some level,” said Scott Cummings, a law professor at the UCLA School of Law who has studied challenges to the legal establishment. “This is the autocratic legal idea of claiming a democratic mandate to attack the rule of law by using law to really erode institutional pillars that are supposed to check executive power.”

Trump’s actions toward lawyers have been “about disabling effective representation of anyone that Trump doesn’t like, and that is the beginning of the end of the adversarial system,” Cummings said, in which both sides of a legal case have equal access to present their views in front of a judge.

The first White House action against lawyers came late last month, when Trump stripped the security clearances of lawyers at a prominent firm, Covington & Burling, who helped former special counsel Jack Smith investigate the president’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The following week, he took far harsher action against Perkins Coie, a law firm that had ties to a dossier of opposition research against Trump that circulated during the 2016 campaign. The executive order barred the firm’s lawyers from federal buildings and directed the federal government to halt any financial relationship with the firm and its clients. That effectively forced Perkins Coie’s clients to pick between their lawyers or any federal government business they might have.

The move could cost Perkins 25 percent of its revenue, the firm said in a court filing contesting the executive order. It said that several clients have already departed the firm, others have said they are thinking about it and federal agencies were excluding it from key meetings with its clients.

“It sends little chills down my spine,” U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell said in court as she granted Perkins Coie a temporary restraining order this month and suggested the executive order might have been unconstitutional. Another major law firm, Williams & Connolly, one of the most skillful and aggressive federal litigators, agreed to take the Perkins Coie case.

Howell said she had “enormous respect for them taking this case when not every law firm would.”

In a filing last week, the Justice Department sought to remove Howell from the case, accusing her and her court of being “insufficiently impartial.”

And even after Howell’s ruling, Trump’s campaign against lawyers broadened when he issued a nearly identical executive order targeting Paul Weiss, a law firm that employed lawyer Mark Pomerantz for two decades before he joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office to help prosecute Trump for hush money payments to a porn star.

Rather than fighting, Paul Weiss cut a deal with the president, even though it had a long track record of aggressive legal action against Trump’s agenda during his first term. Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp met for three hours with Trump at the White House, then agreed to devote $40 million worth of pro bono work “to support the administration’s initiatives,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, including work for veterans and combating antisemitism.

The president rescinded the order against the firm on Thursday.

Paul Weiss has faced significant blowback for its decision to back down, including some lawyers who said that its settlement emboldened Trump to proceed on Friday with the directive for Bondi to pursue the far vaster campaign against all lawyers who might challenge him in federal court.

“Paul Weiss’s deal emboldened him to ratchet up his attack on one of the strongest checks on his power: lawyers and the rule of law,” Perkins Coie partner David Perez wrote on LinkedIn.

The chilling effect has been quick. Some nonprofits say that major law firms that in Trump’s first term would have been quick to assist them with pro bono work now say that they can’t risk the cost if Trump goes after them as a result. Many of those same groups are worried that the administration will soon go after their nonprofit tax status — and that they won’t be able to find high-powered lawyers to contest it.

Although not every lawyer is likely to be cowed by Trump’s actions, the major corporate law firms that the president has targeted have a core role in the U.S. legal system. Complex litigation can require vast resources: experienced lawyers versed in the arcana of case law, platoons of paralegals doing research across thousands of pages of evidence and the stamina to go toe-to-toe with the unparalleled legal resources of the federal government.

Big law firms, best known for deep-pocketed corporate clients, often lend their assistance free to small nonprofits shepherding public interest cases through the courts. They have also been willing, historically, to take on clients who are facing prosecution that they charge is politically motivated. Much of the litigation against Trump’s actions in the first term was driven by the big law firms that he is now targeting.

“If somebody’s been deported to Guantánamo, it used to be law firms would support us and work on it,” said the director of one nonprofit organization that works on different legal challenges to Trump’s agenda. “And now it’s a slower process of getting those approvals, versus just doing what would be done before, which is, ‘This is wrong, and we’re going to represent it.’”

That person and others spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the administration.

Trump’s campaign against the law firms could deprive his opponents of top legal talent, weakening their ability to push back on him, analysts say. And individuals and groups who are taking risks by working against the administration’s agenda may also be deeply vulnerable, forcing them to make difficult choices about when to take a stand against him and when to stay silent.

“We’re telling [small] NGOs with three people on the border to stand strong, and they are standing strong, and then these law firms are folding,” said one lawyer at a nonprofit who works on immigration cases.

Trump on Friday said in a memorandum that lawyers aren’t supposed to file lawsuits or engage in court action unless there is “a basis in law” that is not “frivolous,” suggesting that he and Bondi, not courts, would be in charge of determining what that is.

“Far too many attorneys and law firms have long ignored these requirements when litigating against the Federal Government or in pursuing baseless partisan attacks,” Trump said. “To address these concerns, I hereby direct the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters before executive departments and agencies of the United States.”

Trump’s allies have continued to challenge law firms by name: “Skadden, this needs to stop now,” Elon Musk posted over the weekend, taking aim at the law firm Skadden, Arps in response to right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s complaint that lawyers with the firm had worked pro bono to target him.

Skadden lawyers worked pro bono on behalf of plaintiffs who said D’Souza defamed them in a documentary that falsely accused them of ballot fraud in the 2020 election. D’Souza has previously admitted that the movie was “flawed” and apologized to one of the plaintiffs.

Legal experts said that Trump’s actions amounted to a broad-based assault on the profession.

“This is the livelihood of these lawyers, and the Trump administration is basically saying we’re going to dictate the terms under which you are going to be able to practice your profession,” said Claire Finkelstein, a law professor and the director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5699518&forum_id=2:#48780440)

Sounds kind of like when Trump could only get Long Island strip mall law firms to represent him. Enjoy, libs!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5699518&forum_id=2:#48780522)

and oh by the way, there are something like 90 lawsuits seeking injunctions against the Trump administration. somehow, despite the bleating in that article, lefties are finding lawyers.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5699518&forum_id=2:#48780538)

When you come for the king you best not miss. They missed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5699518&forum_id=2:#48780496)

somehow the Brookings Institute hasn't paid the price for its perfidy.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5699518&forum_id=2:#48780515)