The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has dropped its defence of President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting four prominent law firms, court filings show.
The DOJ requested on Monday (2 March) that the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismiss its appeals of federal judges’ rulings that rebuffed the orders aimed at Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie, Susman Godfrey and WilmerHale. The filing did not say why the appeals were being dropped.
Trump issued the executive orders early last year, accusing the firms of “weaponising” the justice system against him and his allies and engaging in discriminatory diversity and inclusion policies. The orders sought to undercut the firms’ businesses by rescinding security clearances for their lawyers, barring them from accessing federal buildings and threatening their clients’ government contracts.
Jenner & Block, whose hiring of Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor in the special investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, was cited by the executive order against it, noted that the DOJ’s move had cemented the courts’ rulings that found the executive orders unconstitutional.
“This chapter has once again confirmed what has been true of Jenner for more than a century – we will always zealously advocate for our clients and put them first, without compromise,” the firm said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Susman Godfrey, which secured a landmark settlement for Dominion Voting Systems in a lawsuit against Fox News over false claims it aired about Dominion’s involvement in the 2020 election, said “the government has capitulated, which is a fitting end to its plainly unconstitutional attack on Susman Godfrey and the rule of law. In doing so, it has abandoned any attempt to defend the indefensible executive order against our firm”.
Last year, four federal judges – appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents – threw out the orders in separate rulings on the grounds they were unconstitutional.
Overturning the order against Jenner, Judge John Bates, who sits on the US District Court for the District of Columbia and is a Republican appointee, said it sought to “chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the executive branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers”.
A spokesperson for WilmerHale, which drew Trump’s ire for employing former special counsel Robert Mueller before and after he investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election, told The Hill the government’s decision to dismiss its appeal was “clearly the right one”.
“As we said from the outset, our challenge to the unlawful executive order was about defending our clients’ constitutional right to retain the counsel of their choosing and defending the rule of law,” they told the publication.
Meanwhile, Perkins Coie told Reuters its lower court victory had protected “core constitutional freedoms such as free speech, due process and the right to select counsel without fear of retribution”.
The firm was targeted for hiring private research company Fusion GPS while representing Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, which the administration claimed “manufactured a false ‘dossier’ designed to steal an election”.
The executive orders and a related investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission into whether the hiring policies of 20 firms were discriminatory sparked an unprecedented clash between an array of top US law firms and the presidency.
Controversially, nine firms, including Paul Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, pledged a total of $940m in free legal work to avoid similar executive orders.
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