The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice by David Enrich

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice by David Enrich The NYT's Business Investigations Editor reveals the dark side of American law. Delivering a "devastating" (Carol Leonnig) exposé of the astonishing yet shadowy power wielded by the world’s largest law firms, David Enrich traces how one firm shielded opioid makers, gun companies, big tobacco, Russian oligarchs, Fox News, the Catholic Church, and much of the Fortune 500; helped Donald Trump get elected, govern, and evade investigation; masterminded the conservative remaking of the courts . . . and make a killing along the way. In his acclaimed #1 bestseller Dark Towers, David Enrich presented the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality. Now Enrich turns his eye towards the world of “Big Law” and the nearly unchecked influence these firms wield to shield the wealthy and powerful—and bury their secrets. To tell this story, Enrich focuses on Jones Day, one of the world’s largest law firms. Jones Day’s narrative arc—founded in Cleveland in 1893, it became the first law firm to expand nationally and is now a global juggernaut with deep ties to corporate interests and conservative politics—is a powerful encapsulation of the changes that have swept the legal industry in recent decades. Since 2016, Jones Day has been in the spotlight for representing Donald Trump and his campaigns (and now his PACs)—and for the fleet of Jones Day attorneys who joined his administration, including White House Counsel Don McGahn. Jones Day helped Trump fend off the Mueller investigation and challenged Obamacare. Its once and future lawyers defended Trump’s Muslim ban and border policies and handled his judicial nominations. Jones Day even laid some of the legal groundwork for Trump to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election. But the Trump work is but one chapter in the firm’s checkered history. Jones Day, like many of its peers, have become highly effective enablers of the business world’s worst misbehavior. The firm has for decades represented Big Tobacco in its fight to avoid liability for its products. Jones Day worked tirelessly for the Catholic Church as it tried to minimize its sexual-abuse scandals. And for Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, as it sought to protect its right to make and market its dangerously addictive drug. And for Fox News as it waged war against employees who were the victims of sexual harassment and retaliation. And for Russian oligarchs as their companies sought to expand internationally. In this gripping and revealing new work of narrative nonfiction, Enrich makes the compelling central argument that law firms like Jones Day play a crucial yet largely hidden role in enabling and protecting powerful bad actors in our society, housing their darkest secrets, and earning billions in revenue for themselves.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's us here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast i hope you're strapped in i hope you've done all the strapping the seat belting the uh taping yourself duct taping yourself down to the chair you're like chris i hope you've done all the strapping the seat belting the uh taping yourself

duct taping yourself down to the chair you're like chris i'm listening to this at work my employer already did that uh i hope you're ready because we have an amazing journalist on the show uh he's gonna be talking about his new book servants of the damned servants it seems like that should be like it should be like there should be a voice that says, servants of the damned, servants of the damned, giant law firms, Donald Trump, and the corruption of justice by New York Times. David Enrich is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking to some amazing folks. You've probably been seeing him all over TV, talk about all the shocking and alarming and

insightful things that he's done with his journalism. In the meantime, please go refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreads.com for Chester Chris Voss. Go to YouTube.com for Chester Chris Voss. Go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, the big 130,000 LinkedIn group. Follow us over there as well as the LinkedIn newsletter. You'll probably see this one soon.

He wrote, he's written some amazing exposés. One of my favorites was recently Dark Towers, Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction that came out in 2020. Just a really amazing, insightful thing. David Enrich is the business investigations editor at the New York Times. He is the author, most recently, of Servants of the Damned, Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice. He previously was the finance editor. Before joining the Times, he was a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal

in New York and London. We've had many other great journalists on. His previous books are Dark Towers and The Spider Network, about a man at the center of a vast financial scandal. He's the author of the newest book that just came out September 20th, 2022. You want to pick it up while you still can at wherever fine books are sold. Welcome to the show, David. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for having me. There you go. And what do you think about my idea of having, you know, an echoing voice? I like it.

I like it a lot. I will pass it on to the publisher. I'm not an audio book guy, so I deal better with words on the printed page. But, man, those were great effects. I mean, I just kind of ham-assed one there on the amateur thing. So, but, yeah yeah i could see like it during the audiobook the servants of the doomed you know i or damned i should say i will now every time i think of my book i will or say it meant that i might do a little of that echo myself

maybe you could hire like one of those uh dark uh black metal bands to you know do it write a song for the book it could be like like a side thing. Anyway, getting on to the serious business for your book, because this is definitely serious. What motivated you to want to write this book, sir? Well, I've been covering business and finance for almost 20 years now, and for the Wall Street Journal and in the Times. And basically, you know, I've covered just like a ton of big corporate and financial scandals over the years and basically every single one of those i cover in the background is lurking one or more giant corporate law firms and you know they're doing everything from uh

helping kind of do internal investigations of these companies to litigating things sometimes, but also interacting with journalists a lot. So over the years, I've spent a lot of time talking with partners at these firms. And I've just been kind of fascinated, I guess, by the way that they are managing these processes behind the scenes and providing this really high level legal advice. But also, in some ways, I've found are kind of manipulating the media, including me. And one of the ways they do that, that I've found most interesting is that, you know, these partners spend a lot of time with journalists on the phone or in meetings, providing kind of insight information, not in a legal sense, but like, you know, giving you kind

of a lot of background and color on the players involved, kind of gossiping about some of their clients and providing you with documents and other intel that you wouldn't normally have access to. And for a long time, I just kind of thought that was well, that's kind of why they want to do that. So they get their clients stories right in the press. And, you know, it's just good business sense for them. And it began occurring to me, belatedly, I guess, that another big part of the reason they were doing that is that they want to have good relationships with journalists, because that discourages the journalists from ever turning their investigative lenses onto the law firms themselves. And yeah,

the legal industry is a huge industry. I mean, there are billions and billions of dollars every year in revenue, and it deserves a lot of scrutiny, and it does not get a lot of scrutiny, at least in the mainstream media. And so I've been kind of hankering to dive into this and really find a good law firm to start investigating and didn't really know where to look until 2020, when I realized that this law firm Jones Day had been doing a lot of work with the trump campaign and the trump administration that piqued my curiosity and i kind of married those two interests and here we are there you go servants of the damn damn damn servants of the

damned i can just hear it now anyway Anyway, enough of the black metal. So what made you title? I mean, the title of the book is pretty unique, given we're playing on it. What made you pick this title specifically? What was it referenced to, or what was the implication of that? Well, credit where it's due is actually my publisher's idea. But basically, it's a play on two different concepts. One is there's a quote, actually two quotes, in epigram of the books right at the beginning. And one of them is a quote that goes from a famous lawyer and diplomat who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations starting around the Truman era, who says that if law firms and lawyers ever become servants to big business interests, our democracy

is in danger. And that's not a direct quote. That's my paraphrase of it. And then there's another quote from the American Lawyer magazine from a decade or two ago, praising the work that Jones Day, this big corporate law firm, has done serving gun companies and tobacco companies and things like that, saying that Jones Day represents the interests of the damned powerful and the powerfully damned. And I just love that quote from the American lawyer. And so this is a it's kind of a marriage of the servants

from that first quote with the damned from that second quote. And to me, the implication is that these big law firms have become basically the handmaidens to clients that are doing things that are not only often, I think, bad for the world, but the lawyers themselves in the process of representing some of these clients are themselves doing things that I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear about. And, you know, you profile Jones Day a lot in the book and talk about some of the different issues that surround them. A lot of people aren't familiar with Jones Day. I've been getting familiar with it, unbeknownst to I was reading your New York Times post, and getting familiar with what was going on. I'm like, holy crap. And I started, you know, understanding what Jones Day was doing.

Let's talk about this firm and how much of the book is dedicated to them and how many other different firms you cover. Well, there are a bunch of law firms in the book. I mean, Jones Day is definitely the biggest focus, though. And the reason I picked them, and I mentioned the Trump stuff earlier, and that's definitely how they kind of caught my attention to begin with. But the reason I liked Jones Day as a target was not really about the Trump stuff so much as it was that the law firm is really emblematic of a lot of stuff that's going on in the broader legal industry that I find, you know, very deserving of outside scrutiny. And so Jones Day, in a nutshell, and it was founded in 1893, in Cleveland, Ohio. And for many, many decades was just this big corporate law firm of choice for kind of a who's who of big American companies. I mean, they famously represented General Motors for many years, they represented parts of the

Rockefeller Empire. Uh, and then starting in the eighties, they got their, their biggest client at the time, which became RJR, the tobacco company. And, uh, and so I I've spent, I spend, I don't know, maybe two thirds of the book focusing on the kind of the run of the mill corporate work that a law firm like Jones Day does and how the legal profession, which had kind of for most ofof-the-mill corporate work that a law firm like Jones Day does and how the legal profession, which had kind of for most of its existence, had really prided itself on not putting profits first. The kind of the key motivators for the legal profession were an obligation and commitment to honesty and fairness and the rule of law and really trying to seek just outcomes, regardless of whether

you're the winner or the loser. And starting in the really late 70s, early 80s, and continuing to this day, that ethos began to completely change. And Jones Day was at the kind of vanguard of this change, and really leading the shift from the legal profession into the legal industry, where there was this cutthroat emphasis on profits. And so the firm Jones, again, I'm kind of picking on them, I guess, but it's in the interest of telling a broader story about how these giant law firms came to really dominate our economy, our society, even our politics. You know, in my business years ago, I saddled up the side some really badass attorneys, and I always called them evil attorneys

because they were good at destroying during discovery phase. And they would, I mean, if you had a speeding ticket, they would beat them down with just every possible discovery item and delay. It would be maddening what they would do. And they were my friends, so they would teach me all the stuff they would do. And evidently, Jones Day has kind of made this their hallmark. Is that correct? Yeah.

I mean, they're first and foremost, really good at their jobs. And their jobs are to defend big companies primarily, that are in trouble with the government or with their customers or whatnot. And, and the secret sauce of big law firms like Jones is not simply that they're good lawyers, it's that they throw enormous, virtually infinite resources at assignments. And so, you know, if you are a person who has been harmed by a product manufactured by, you know, Acme Widget Company, and Jones Day is representing Acme Widgets, they are not going to just litigate the question of, were you or were you not harmed by this product? Is it or is it not Acme Widgets' fault? They are going to dig into your background.

They are going to dig into your family's background. They're going to talk to your neighbors, your high school classmates. They're going to do all sorts of research, really kind of turning over every single stone they can find to not really to seek the truth of the matter, but to find ways to undermine your credibility and raise doubt in the minds of judges and juries about whether you can trust anything I say, or we can trust anything any of the witnesses can say. And so it's a brutal, just bare knuckled, scorched earth strategy that these law firms use. And again, Jones Day has become, has long been one of the leading, most aggressive corporate litigation firms in the country, but it is hardly alone. I mean, this is par for the course. And to me,

one of the most surprising, or I guess, troubling aspects of this is that when two companies are facing off each other in court for one reason or another, I get why you want these very aggressive law firms going at each other and you want all stones, you want no stones left unturned. And that makes total sense. The problem is that these big corporate law firms almost never representing anyone other than big companies. And so when a normal human being or a small business, really anyone else goes up against a giant company that's represented by one of these law firms, it's just a completely lopsided fight. And the whole reason that everyone is entitled to a robust legal defense is that the justice system is supposed to have two sides, both, you know, with very good legal advocates, zealously representing each

other. And when one side has, you know, 100 times more resources at its disposal, the outcome is not two sides zealously going after each other. It's one size just steamrolling the other. And that tends, in my experience, to not yield really fair results. The cover of your book has a dollar hanging over the wing of Lady Justice, who's supposed to be blindfolded and impartial. Do you, do you find that, that, that ability to just throw everything with them with the backing of money? Uh, do you find that that, uh, tips tilts the scales of, of lady justice? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there, I mean, there's just no question about that. I think that there's a bigger debate one can have about how to best deal with that in that imbalance, but there's no question the imbalance exists and it

is it's not like a kind of a little imbalance it's like a huge imbalance and and to me there's a lot there's like a many examples i could say to me the most kind of poignant one involves a case i detail in the book uh involving the giant health care company abbott labs which among many other things makes powdered infant formula. And that powdered infant formula is something that there's a pattern going back decades of on very rare occasions babies who consume it get a contracted type of bacterial meningitis that can either kill them or leave them severely brain damaged. And so there's a history of families of

children who have experienced these tragedies, suing companies like Abbott. And again, the research on this academic research, scientific research, it's black and white, this may be overstating it, but it's very clear that there is, babies are very unlikely to get this type of meningitis if they are not consuming powdered infant formula. That formula is a known breeding ground for this type of bacteria on and on and on anyway just to cut to the case the to me one of the most powerful statistics i saw was that abbott having faced probably dozens if not more of these lawsuits over the decades has not once lost in court and that is not does not mean that abbott's baby formula has never poisoned a baby.

It means that the law firm, which is represented by Jones Day, has just been incredibly savvy and aggressive and effective at either crushing plaintiffs in court or in the rare cases where they think they might actually lose, they reach these out-of-court settlements that pay their families some money, but come with the stipulation that you were not allowed to talk about the case publicly. And so the result is that families go uncompensated. And more broadly, the world just does not know about this pattern. And this burst into the national spotlight earlier this year, when a of or a couple babies died and the FDA then found huge problems in one of Abbott's factories that makes baby formula which led to a shutdown which led to this huge crisis where there wasn't enough baby formula to go around

but this has been a problem that had been going around and was known in the public health community it was known in the formula community it was known in the formula community. It was known to the legal community for decades. And just nothing ever got done about it because I think in part Abbott was using these lawyers who were just going to the ends of the earth to defend their clients in a way that really silenced this issue. Yeah. You said they went after a guy, you know, he had a, he had an affair on the side. One of the fathers. They bring that in and just, just a long, I think, was it eight hours or 14 hours that you said? It was seven hours. Seven hours just beating the parents, these parents of this poor child, into oblivion

and trying to find anything that might, you know, they can take into court and throw up against them. Yeah, and this is a pattern in these cases, right? And I only detail one of these cases primarily in the book, but I found a bunch of others where, you know, you mentioned the thing where the father was having an affair, which was, you know, after the baby had contracted meningitis and nearly died. So it had nothing on its face to do with the question of whether or not, or how the baby had been poisoned and who was to blame for that.

But then there's other cases where, you know, a similar situation where a baby was poisoned or a baby fell ill after consuming formula and Abbott through its lawyers at Jones day tries to raise the issue of a restraining order that was taken against another member of the baby's family years after the meningitis incident. And that's on top of all sorts of... And look, those are tactics that are common in corporate litigation when normal human beings go up against big companies and their big lawyers. And these are tactics that Jones Day in particular mastered over decades of representing RJR on tobacco cases. And in these Abbott cases, what struck me as really unusual is that not only were they deploying these super

aggressive tactics to kind of demean and at times, I think, intimidate the plaintiffs, but they were also doing engagement conduct such as witness coaching and improper conduct during pretrial depositions and things like that, that a federal judge who was presiding over the case said was just the worst conduct he'd ever seen in his two decades on the federal bench. This is not, in any court case, the losers of the case are going to complain about the tactics of the opposing side and complain about the judge's bias and whatnot. What sets these cases apart, in my mind, is that it's not just the plaintiffs complaining after the fact. It's a federal judge who has a very good track record on the bench and has no particular reason to make accusations of

bias, is saying that these conducts were just beyond completely beyond the pill not even a close call and i've seen incidents like that with jones and other law firms in just a wide variety of cases and it leads me to the conclusion that the this is not the exception this is the rule these firms use just these completely uh just their tactic is shock and awe, essentially. And they're really, really good at creating that atmosphere. And probably intimidation as well, would you say? Yeah. I mean, there's another example that just jumps to mind as we're talking about this,

where in Jones Day's representation of R.J. Reynolds, they had Jones Day had hired an academic or was paying for an academic to conduct research into the dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke. The researcher ultimately decided that maybe this secondhand smoke wasn't as bad as he had originally said. He then agrees, the researcher agrees to cooperate with state investigators that are digging into the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry, Jones Day, learns of this cooperation. And according to the academic, Jones Day lawyer calls him up and basically threatens that the full weight of Jones Day is going to come down upon you if you cooperate. And this academic is so scared by this perceived threat that he reports

it to the judge who's presiding over the case. The judge offers him the protection of the U.S. Marshal Service, and the guy's wife was terrified. And again, Jones Day's response is that the guy is lying and that those words were never uttered. This guy is now dead, so it's a little hard to adjudicate who's telling the truth here. Certainly one person seems to be lying. But from what I've seen in these tobacco cases, in the baby formula case, the work they've done in other cases as well, there's a clear pattern of law firms like Jones Day, just going to the ends of the earth to win at all costs. And usually they're doing usually, but not always they're doing that within the ethical parameters that they're supposed to. But, you know, they're good lawyers,

and they're very good at coming right up to that line without crossing it. And also, they're very good at identifying loopholes in the law and the ethical codes that govern the legal profession, in ways that they can kind of exploit little loopholes without actually violating any actual rules. Definitely. I mean, it's quite extraordinary what you put forth in the book. What a lot of people don't know and don't understand is how steep they are in politics. Tell us how big Jones Day is from a money standpoint and size and power.

And then let's talk about, I believe there was a partner that joined them, that turned them kind of on a conservative slant, and they became a real powerhouse under the Trump administration. Yeah, so Jones Day is one of the largest law firms in the world, but not the largest. It's not even the largest in the U.S., actually. It has about 2,400, 2,500 lawyers in, I think, about 40 countries around the largest. It's not even the largest in the U.S., actually. It has about 2,400, 2,500 lawyers in, I think, about 40 countries around the world.

It makes about $2, $2.5 billion a year in revenue, which is a lot of money. But again, Jonesy is definitely not the biggest. But, you know, it's a huge powerhouse. And so they were, up until the early 2000s were really just a run of the mill, very good corporate litigation firm. In the early 2000s, the firm got a new managing partner, so a new person running the firm. His name is Steve Brogan. He was extremely, is extremely conservative.

And the firm's kind of culture began to shift, I think, slightly at first and more dramatically over time. And a bunch of people arrived at the firm in senior capacities and in capacities where they were, you know, had very public facing jobs that were cut from the kind of the same very conservative cloth. And I'm not even sure who you're referring to specifically about the arrival. I mean, there's a guy named Mike Carvin, who is very conservative in old Francisco. To me, the biggest one that really changed things was a guy named Don McGahn, who arrived in 2014. Jones decided to start a new practice, advising clients on political and

election law. And so they hired this team of hotshot Republicans from another law firm, including Don McGahn. And McGahn, one of the first clients he brought on after he arrived in early 2015, was the Trump campaign, which was, you know, just getting started. No one was really taking it seriously. It was just kind of like a small group of people running things. And McGahn was hired to be the outside lawyer for the Trump campaign. And so he and Jones Day really worked not only to professionalize the campaign and ensure that it complied with laws and help set up all the kind of legal infrastructure you need to run a presidential campaign, but also, and I think more important than that, really worked to help build and then cement the Trump campaign's credibility with the Republican

establishment and the kind of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. And that's something that was going to be very hard for Trump to do. I mean, this is someone who had kind of flirted with being a Democrat over the years, was, to put it mildly, had been pretty wishy-washy on key issues like abortion. And the conservative establishment of the Republican Party just was not taking him seriously, even as he started rising in the polls and started kind of pummeling everyone in the primary debates, which seems like a long time ago. But basically, the key way that Jones Day made a difference in those primaries was that it invited, it basically invited people aligned with the Federalist Society and with a whole bunch of Republican lawmakers as well

to come to Jones Day's offices, which are right on the foot of Capitol Hill. It's this grand kind of neoclassical building. And it was there that Trump made the fateful announcement that he would pick his next, his first Supreme Court nominees from a pre-approved list of judges that he would announce to the world that he would he would create based on the work of jones day and the federalist society and it you know the rest is history i mean that that mitch mcconnell this who at the time was a senate majority leader said years later that that the creation of the list that that list of potential nominees, and the fact that it became public was the single biggest factor moving the Republican establishment in line behind Donald

Trump and therefore helping him not only win the primaries, but also short his support and drive turnout during the general election in November. And well, we all know the outcome. Yeah, this is one of the most important things about your book that people need to understand. You know, the hand behind the power that no one sees. Like, everyone just sees, okay, Trump won the election, and maybe he was a charismatic dude and promised a lot of stuff that he never delivered. But people don't see the powers that are behind that thing. And I imagine they helped him, working with the Federalist Society and everything, raise money from rich donors, rich clients, etc., etc. They represented, what, opiates, guns, tobacco. These are all places that were fairly favored during the Trump administration.

So I imagine it was easy for them to, you know, help rope in donors. Yeah, I mean, I think they were Jones. It was provided in this kind of full service role or full service assignment from to the Trump campaign. And it ranged from, as I said, kind of creating the campaign infrastructure, ensuring compliance with the law. But then this whole much broader range of political activity, essentially, where the Republican National Convention that year in 2016 happened to be in Cleveland, which was Jones Day's historical home. And so Jones Day was a sponsor of the Republican Convention that year. They hosted all these political events at their headquarters. They had a bunch of their top partners getting on stage with elected official, Republican elected officials,

and people who would then be in Trump's cabinet, basically railing against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. And, again, there's nothing wrong with that on its face, right? There's that something everyone is entitled to their own political views. But it was it was a really unusual moment for a law firm, a big law firm, to kind of go so heavy on one party and one candidate, A. And B, to me, and this is the most interesting part to me, is that it showed that, you know, Jones Day, like other law firms, had mastered these kind of smash mouth legal tactics in court that they would use on behalf and out of court, on behalf of clients, big business clients over the years. And now you kind of saw them bring

this these ruthless tactics to the political realm in a way that was maybe not unprecedented but unusual and really powerful i mean there was the fact that they were before trump even won the nomination had this huge vetting operation to vet judges and potential judges and to kind of create to assemble this machinery is that's the kind of thing that happens in big corporate law firms when they're preparing for a court fight on behalf of a big client. That's not the type of machinery you usually see a law firm doing in a political campaign. And it was really it was it was key to Trump's campaign. Yeah, we, you know, we, this is why, again, I love books like yours,

because it shows the hand behind the power and the true power, actually, if you really think about it, I suppose. And, you know, we're living in a world right now where we've been kind of shocked with the overturning of roe versus wade we've seen that you know most people don't even understand the 40 years that people like the betsy devos organization center for uh center for uh his name escapes me now center for national policy and and people have been pushing to overturn roe versus wade their their whole agenda of the republican party conservatives have been pushing to overturn Roe versus Wade. Their whole agenda of the Republican Party, conservatives have been to stack the court

and they've been working on that and they've won a lot of different things like the Citizens United, different things like that, overturning where you can now buy, I mean, just the power stack of the SCOTUS and we finally starting to see the results of that stack winning out

where their agendas of the conservative right are coming to fruition with a very right-leaning court. But you write in your book and you talk about how this leads to power and this leads to a lot of money, too. Don McGahn gets into the Trump administration. He's working with the Federalist Society to handpick the judges to go up. How much talk about how much money and power this ends up giving them as they basically help Trump ascend to the White House? Well, it's power a lot. I can't be more specific than that because power is intangible, but a lot of power and I think probably a lot of money as well. I mean, they the amount of money that Jones Day was making representing the Trump campaign

was kind of a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of the billions of dollars a year they're making overall. But I think what was much more important in terms of was that it enabled Jones Day, when they were representing corporate clients like Walmart, for example, that had business before the federal government. The fact that the Trump administration had become staffed with dozens of Jones Day lawyers at the upper echelons, not just in the White House, but also the Justice Department, among other places. It allowed Jones Day, its current lawyers, to go to some of their recent colleagues and seek help for their corporate clients when those clients like Walmart were under federal investigation. And so you would have situations like that,

that are, and that's priceless if you're Walmart, right? There's, there was not another law firm in the country that could have gone like Jones stated and had three or four people high up in the Justice Department that were in, they were able to receive letters or organize meetings or kind of play defense. And look, Jones Day would argue, and the people who were at the Justice Department and then returned to Jones Day would argue that they were managed to kind of have something resembling a wall between their previous work for Jones Day and their current work on behalf of taxpayers. But if you look at the outcome, again, in this Walmart case, you know, their previous work for Jones Day and their current work on behalf of taxpayers. But if you look at the outcome, again, in this Walmart case,

and Walmart, by the way, was under federal criminal and civil investigation for its role dispensing opioids that ended up killing a lot of people. And the allegation against Walmart was that it had basically been extremely reckless in giving out opioids based on prescriptions that were clearly bogus and where doctors were, you know, ready thousands of prescriptions at once. And the argument was that Walmart, some of Walmart's employees had raised red flags about this. Walmart executives knew about it and yet they allowed it to continue happening

because again, allegedly this was in the company's bottom, interest of the company's bottom line. And so Walmart, while as this federal criminal investigation was intensifying, and it looks like the company might be charged, Jones Day's lawyers representing Walmart reached out to people high up in the Justice Department, some of whom used to work at Jones Day very recently. And what happens next is that the criminal investigation

just gets shut down. Apparently, well, I won't even say who shut it down, but I will say that at the time it was shut down, there were people very high up who had recently worked at Jones Day in the Justice Department. And those are the same people who had been on the receiving end of some of the outbound phone calls and emails and letter writing

that had come from Jones Day. And so, again, Jones Day and Walmart argue there's actually nothing wrong with the way they conducted themselves. And my guess is that there was nothing wrong, at least under the law and under legal ethics. I think they were probably very careful to not cross any lines. But, you know, I think there's a lot of people out there who are rightly very concerned with the appearance of a conflict of interest, and trying to maintain the integrity, and the perception of integrity with the way the government operates. And that's not a good way to do it. I mean, you know, like, there is few things that erode confidence in the system faster than the appearance of having very rich lawyers going to work on behalf of their very rich corporate clients, calling up their very recent colleagues.

And then their very recent colleagues, maybe related, maybe not related, end up doing something resembling what they've been asked to do. That's not a great look. And my understanding is they've been very good at recruiting clerks and different people so that they can kind of meld kind of more of a mesh with the government and people in the government so they can have that sort of influence. So Jones Day would argue that, look, there's no question that that's true in the sense that Jonesones day has just been an absolute juggernaut when it comes to recruiting uh former supreme court clerks to work for the

firm i mean the jones they like some other law firms hands out signing bonuses to former clerks who some i think it's above four hundred thousand dollars per signing bonus which incidentally is more than supreme court justices themselves earn uh and jones they would dispute and i think there's some reason in fairness to them to dispute the rationale behind that and they say the rationale is not that they're trying to like buy access inside the court it's that they want a they want people who understand how the court works from the inside and that's you, you know, not unreasonable, I guess. And the second thing is that they argue, and I think this is true, that big clients like the idea of hiring a law firm that employs a lot of people who have this kind of inside knowledge, even if they're not using that inside knowledge in an inappropriate way, right? I mean, but again, you know, to fall

back on this question of the appearance of propriety and appearance of a conflict of interest, a lot of legal scholars and other watchdog groups have raised really serious concerns about the degree to which Jones Day in particular has scooped up just over the recent years and dozens of Supreme clerks far more than any other law firm. And, and I think those concerns have been only compounded in the past several years during the Trump administration when not only was Don McGahn and his former Jones Day colleagues in the White House Counsel's Office selecting federal judges, but also some of the federal judges that were being selected under Trump were from Jones Day. And so there are a bunch of recent Jones Day partners and associates who ended up during the Trump administration

with lifetime appointments to the federal bench, including some very senior ones. Greg Katsis, who by all accounts is a very accomplished, well-respected lawyer, had been a longtime Jones Day partner, went with McGahn to the White House, and then the White House nominates him to be a federal judge. And he's now on the D.C. appeals court, which is behind the Supreme Court, the most powerful court in the country. And there are a bunch of others as well. I mean, when a court last year, or I'm sorry, earlier this year, struck down the Biden administration's mask mandate on planes and other transportation, that was a very young and,

according to the American Bar Association, a very inexperienced and unqualified federal judge who had only recently been hired by John Stey. And so you see the implications of this playing out more or less in real time. Yeah. And people need to understand this. You know, a lot of people ran around angry and are still angry about the overturning Roe versus Wade, but they need to understand the power and the money and the hands that are behind this like you know people running around going well trump trump did this well he kind of did this but there's a lot of you you've got to understand the power that's behind this the federal society and and and organizations like jones day um and i think they even got involved with challenging the election results didn't they in 2020 yeah it's not quite that simple. I mean, basically, they were representing,

this took place in Pennsylvania, which, as you may recall, was kind of the key battleground state in the election. And Pennsylvania, the year before the election, had made it much easier to do absentee and mail-in voting, which proved fortuitous since then there was a pandemic and people wanted to do and mail-in voting, which, you know, proved fortuitous since then there was a pandemic and people wanted to do more mail-in voting. And the law had been written in 2019 in Pennsylvania that basically you had to have your mail-in ballots received in the election

office by election day. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court then ruled that because the mail service was going so slow i don't know if you remember that but it seems like years ago but the mail service had basically stopped working and so the pennsylvania supreme court ruled that to enforce that election day deadline risked disenfranchising essentially a broad swath of the pennsylvania electorate and so they ruled that there would be an extra three days to receive ballots. And Jones went to court in Pennsylvania to basically try to invalidate that three-day extension. And their argument was that that would open the door to improper voting and possibly fraudulent

voting. The Supreme Court, which ultimately prevailed on this, argued, sorry, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, not the U.S. Supreme Court, argued that to do otherwise was basically to almost willfully be tossing out legitimate votes. And Jones Day also got involved in another case in Pennsylvania that was trying to make it harder, or trying to make it easier, I should say, for county election officials to invalidate certain absentee ballots if their signatures weren't exactly alike and

again both of these jones day would argue that these were legitimate constitutional issues it was litigating yes it was doing it on behalf of republicans and on behalf of trump but these were fair reasonable arguments they were making i think the counter argument to that is which is made by a lot of people even inside jones day was that the intent of this was clear, which is to make it harder for votes that were likely to lean Democratic to count. And that is something that if you believe in the rule of law, and you believe in democracy, is not a great look, right? I mean, we, especially during a pandemic, but really in any time, like, why would you want to do things that make it harder to vote?

And there's a huge backlash inside the law firm. I think there's a lot of blowback externally as well. I will say in fairness to Jones Day, once again, I don't want to sound like an apologist here, but to be fair, they were not involved in any of the crazy nonsense. The the julie eye stuff or the um sydney powell stuff or any of that kind of lunatic nonsense so they did draw a line there it seems but i mean i think from the perspective of a lot of people inside jones day and certainly outside of jones day the fact

that they were willing to go to this length with a with a presidential candidate who at that point had already been very noisily fanning these unsubstantiated fears about the risks of a stolen election i think it struck a lot of people inside the firm as really reckless yeah and i i vaguely remember and i think you'd written about this but i vaguely remember years ago i believe rick wilson was the guy who started it or one of those proponents but uh he used to be a republican strategist uh but i think he started the thing where they called out uh where they called out the company and got people to try and i don't know if cancel would be the right word try and basically you know pepper them and stuff was it Rick Wilson

that started that role? It was the Lincoln Project that was doing a lot of this at the time and I'll be clear like I think some of the tactics the Lincoln Project were using were like pretty blunt instruments to put it mildly and

look everyone's entitled to legal counsel when they're accused of wrongdoing. There's no question about that. I think that to me, the better way to articulate that, though, is that while you are entitled to a robust legal defense when you're accused of wrongdoing, that does not entitle you to legal services that involve anything from intimidating witnesses to, you know, smearing plaintiffs to threatening people's right to vote. I mean,

that's not something that those are not among the services envisioned by the sixth amendment to the U S constitution. Yeah. The book's explosive and incredibly insightful. Everyone should read it. It should be required reading. I, in my opinion,

how hard has it been as a, as a journalist to report on Jones day? and incredibly insightful. Everyone should read it. It should be required reading, in my opinion. How hard has it been as a journalist to report on Jones Day? I mean, imagine the New York Times. Attorneys have to pour over everything. How hard is it for you and other reporters who might be intimidated by trying to cover this beat? I think, I mean, everyone, when I started working on this a couple years ago, everyone was like, oh, Jones Day is the most secretive place. There's no way anyone there will talk to you. And it was not that hard, honestly. And I've been doing this for a long time. So I kind of know

a bunch of the tricks of the trade of getting people to talk. But ultimately, I got a lot of people, both current and former Jones Day lawyers came up and down the food chain to talk confidentially, if nothing else. And once you down the food chain to talk confidentially, if nothing else. And once you start getting certain people to talk, it makes it easier to get other people to talk. I mean, I will say one of my concerns all along was that, you know, Jones Day is a litigious law firm. And that made me, I think, a little bit nervous. But I really, I have a great publisher, HarperCollins, that has, you know, is itself part of a very big company that I think makes it a less enticing target for

even a litigious law firm. And so I think, look, there's a track record, not with Jones Day, but in general of big law firms firms when anyone is writing critically about them to just really deploy some of these tactics that they've become infamous for against the journalists. And I detail some of this in the book, not involving Jones Day, really, but involving other law firms that have really, in my opinion, just gone completely crazy with just over-the-top kind of censorship tactics. Jones Day, to its credit, didn't really do that. What they did do, they did hire their own lawyers and outside law firm to represent them in the

law firm. That law firm sent not threatening letters, but kind of high pressure letters. You could say to my publisher complaining about what I was writing, demanding to see a manuscript of the book, accusing me of bias. But again, I don't want to make it sound like that was some terrifying situation where I was shaking in my boots.

This is kind of run-of-the-mill tactics these days for people who are writing about big businesses or big institutions. I think that's kind of unfortunate, but the tactics Jones they used were in that context, I think fairly middle of the road and certainly were not, they never risked derailing the book in part because I tried to be really careful about what I was writing and also wanted to be fair to them.

And from the very beginning of this process was soliciting feedback from, among others, their managing partner, Steve Bergen, who unfortunately refused to talk to me. There you go. I mean, I can see that it can have a chilling effect, though, on reporters, especially smaller, localized reporters who don't have a big attorney, as I'm sure, like like the New York Times does. Hang on, I just got an email here.

Oh, look, it's my C&D from Jones Day. Cease and desist. No, I'm just kidding. No, that's a joke, people. But I'll expect one within the hour. So this has been pretty insightful. What else do we want to just tease out in your book, get people to go out and pick it up that we haven't maybe touched on? I mean, one of the other kind of interesting

elements of this to me is that I kind of knew going into this that I suspected I would find examples of big law firms using slightly unsavory tactics against plaintiffs and just against their opponents. What I was more surprised to find actually was, and there's a lot of that in the book, but I was also really surprised to find how even in dealing with their own employees, sometimes the firm and others was just, I mean, really heavy handed to put it mildly.

And there are examples of people getting verbally or in some cases physically assaulted. And the firm's ethos is really, you know, they say they want to have an open kind of workplace where dissent is tolerated. But in talking to dozens of people who work there, the culture that was created by the firm in an effort to kind of have a cohesive organization it was it really ended up i think often discouraging dissent even if that wasn't necessarily the intention and to me it's that's like a really interesting lesson in kind of organizational dynamics which is not the sexiest thing in the world but i think for anyone who works at a big company or a big organization of any sort it it might ring true.

And I think there are a lot of lessons that people can take as they, you know, for the importance of establishing, not just being lip service to the idea of having kind of a small D democratic culture, but the importance of actually seeing how the how your leaders rhetoric and actions really quickly trickles down through an organization, sometimes in a not very healthy way. You know, we saw some of that with the original management of Uber. Yeah, absolutely. Very bullying, very sort of thing. You know, I guess if you're bullied at Jones Day, you should probably hire an attorney. There you go. Well, it's a very insightful book.

A lot of explosive stuff, the Abbott Labs thing, attorneys that are, you know, are helping, you know, guys do evil stuff around the world, hide money, you know, drug traffickers and other things that you have in the book. It's quite extraordinary and it's a, it's a wonderful read and everyone, like I said, should read it and really understand the power that's behind what goes on in our world and how it shapes our world. I mean, look how different our world is going to be. Our elections are probably going to be different because of the overturning of Roe versus Wade. And then you look back and understand how Don McGahn and the Federalist Society stacked the court,

how they brought the Trump administration into fruition. People don't understand. There's years, decades sometimes, sometimes several decades that go behind these things that, you know, affect what's going on today. And people wake up from it and they go into shock and they just go, oh, the SCOTUS is bad. And you're just like, no, you voted like crap for 40 years, and this is the result. And welcome. You know, you get the government you deserve. Give us your plugs real quick before we go out so people can find you on the interwebs, please, sir.

I'm sorry, give you my what? Plugs, dot coms, wherever you are. Oh, I don't really do dot coms. But I'm on Twitter at David Enrich. I'm on Facebook at David J. Enrich, I think. Instagram, David dot Ens. I, but I'm on Twitter at David Enrich. I'm on Facebook at David J. Enrich. I think Instagram, David dot Enrich LinkedIn.

I'm there, but I don't actually know what my handle is because I'm an idiot with this kind of stuff. That's okay. And you, you, there's a small website, the New York times.

I think that you're on. Yeah. Yeah. There is that small website. They might want to, they just sent me an email saying, make sure he plugs the New York Times. I'm just kidding.

They didn't do that, but I don't think they need anyone's help. They don't, they don't. They sent me a CD too. Anyway, I'm just kidding. David has been wonderful and very insightful to have you on the show and

hopefully very educational for audience. I encourage everyone to go out and buy the book. Thank you very much for coming on, sharing your story with us today. Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun. Thank you. And guys, go pick up the book. Wherever fine books are sold, stay out of those alleyway bookstores because I went in one last

week, had to get a tetanus shot. Pick it up. Servants of the Damned. Giant law firms. Donald Trump and the corruption of justice. I had the date wrong actually earlier. I quoted the paperback date. The hardcover came out September 13, 2022. So if you're watching that 20, 10 years from now on YouTube,

don't tell me that I got the dates wrong. Pick it up wherever Fine Books are sold. Go see us on YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, and all the places the Chris Voss Show channels are. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.