The NPR Politics Podcast - Explaining Trump's Fight With Big Law Firms

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

President Trump has issued executive orders targeting certain law firms, seeking to restrict their business endeavors. While some firms have settled, others have fought back. We look at why firms have chosen different paths, and whether Trump's orders — some of which have been struck down in court — present legal questions themselves. This podcast: voting correspondent Miles Parks, national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, my name is Mr. Stinson and I'm the coach of Marylouma High School's Speech and Debate Team. We are currently at the Chassus Speech and Debate State Championship. This podcast was recorded at 106 p.m. on Monday, June 2nd, 2025. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Hopefully we've been able to snatch some trophies. Go Matadors! I am sure we have some future lawyers in that bunch.

Sure. I was thinking future MPR Politics podcasters maybe. Maybe, maybe. This is that time of year for all those awards and competitions, so good luck. Yeah. Hey there, it's the MPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

I'm Kerry Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Domenico Mazzanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, law firms and how they were responding to pressure from the Donald Trump White House. So Kerry, you have reported a lot on this and I want to start this spring when the president announced a number of executive orders targeting law firms. Can you explain what those executive orders did? Yeah, the president basically sought to ban lawyers from federal buildings to ask about

the clients of these lawyers and whether they had contracts with the federal government and then maybe to take steps to get rid of those contracts. And finally, to yank the security clearances of many of these lawyers. And Miles, that matters a lot because so much of what lawyers have to do relates to classified information and if you can't get in the door and access those files to defend your client, then you're totally boxed out of that market. You can't do your job. So, I mean, why?

Why? What did these law firms do that was so bad in Donald Trump's eyes? Well, according to President Trump, these big law firms needed to be held accountable, that they were using their power and influence in ways that certainly frustrated some of his policy goals and in his view, ran afoul of the law. He talked in particular about immigration enforcement and priorities and some of the work these firms had done with LGBTQ rights, some environmental cases and all sorts of other things. So he wanted to punish them and get them in line.

Domenico, it does feel like this fits into a broader trend, right? Of Donald Trump. I mean, he promised on the campaign trail last year that this was going to be a retribution presidency, that he was going to target his political enemies. Is this part of that? Absolutely. Part of a broader pattern of retribution. And, you know, we've seen this around the world when you have regimes that try to take power and try to consolidate power in one place. A lot of autocracies around the world, the first place that they push to try to consolidate that power is going after big institutions, lawyers, judges, journalists, colleges.

You know, you're trying to control the courts, you're trying to control what's said about you in the public sphere, and you're trying to control what people learn. You know, in some of the firms that Trump has targeted, he's targeted in part because of who they hired. He went after this Wilmer Hale law firm in part because it employed Robert Mueller,

the former special counsel who investigated Trump's campaign's ties to Russia. He went after Jenner and Block because it once employed Andrew Weissman, one of the prosecutors on Mueller's team. And some of the firms that are trying to fight back against these executive orders basically say this is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment and it's explicit payback for some of those investigations. I mean is there any precedence for what the president has been doing here? How has the legal world been responding?

Yeah, no one can remember something like this happening. In fact, I talked with Steve Brill who founded the American Lawyer magazine and the Court TV network back in the day and he said this was so distressing that it kept him up at night. And he could not believe that the firms were in this situation. And you know, Miles, some of the firms have decided to settle with the federal government and others have decided to fight back. And the ones that have fought back in court are largely winning, even with judges appointed by conservative presidents in the past. Well, I want to center on the ones who've settled first, because I am curious about

what those deals looked like. What exactly did they agree to do? We don't know the entire terms of these agreements, but what we do know is that about nine law firms that settled agreed to do pro bono work, provide free legal services and the amount of nearly $1 billion for causes both they and the Trump administration seem to want to advance. And what President Trump has said about that is that it could involve veterans affairs,

it could involve immigration. He's even floated the idea that it could involve defending police officers who kill people in their line of duty. Okay, let's take a quick break and then more on these deals and then also the firms that are fighting back, right? Right after this. I'm Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. At a time of sound bites and short attention spans, our show is all about the deep dive. We do long form interviews with people behind

the best in film, books, TV, music and journalism. Here our guests open up about their process and their lives in ways you've never heard before. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY. On the Indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs. It's called in game theory a trigger strategy or sometimes called grim trigger, which sort of has a cowboy-esque ring to it. To what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is.

For insight every weekday, listen to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. And we're back. So Carrie, let's get back to the law firms that have made deals with the Trump administration. Your latest reporting is that many lawyers are looking at these deals and thinking they may not actually be legal even. Can you explain that? Yeah, you know, it's hard to tell what's exactly

in the substance of these deals because we haven't seen much in writing about them. And that itself is unusual because lawyers put things to writing. Everything's in writing, right? That's a big deal. Yeah. Exactly. And you know, most lawyers in law school take a class called contracts.

And there they learn a bunch of things, one of which is that in order for there to be a valid agreement, both sides have to understand what they're agreeing to. I talked with Yale law professor Harold Coe, who's been thinking about these law firm deals, and here's what he had to say. For there to be a valid contract, there has to be a meeting of the minds. Both sides have to agree on what they have agreed upon. And then secondly, there needs to be consideration, which is each side has to give up something to get something. The problem with the law firm deals, or as they're called, is that they're not deals at all. The law firms thought it meant one thing, and President

Trump and his team seem to think it means another. You know, a contract that you make with a gun to your head is not a contract. And then there's this whole other possibility that these deals could also potentially run up against federal bribery laws. Can you explain that? There are a number of scholars who think that these deals could violate either ethics codes for lawyers and law firms or maybe even criminal laws or civil laws. They could give rise to conflicts of interest between lawyers and law firms and their laws. They could give rise to conflicts of interest between lawyers and

law firms and their clients. They could give rise to litigation about that. And they could even violate federal criminal law. Although, Miles, right now it's hard to imagine the Trump Justice Department bringing any criminal charges along these lines. I spoke with Congresswoman April McLean Delaney. She's a longtime lawyer. Right now, she's a member of Congress, a Democrat from Maryland. And she sent letters to these settling law firms to try to ask them a bit more detail about these deals they signed and whether they've exposed themselves to more problems. Here's what the Congresswoman had to say. They made these agreements to really avoid being targeted by investigations and that these executive orders would potentially put their

firms out of business. Pro Bono is usually for the most disadvantaged or disenfranchised, those that cannot afford to have legal representation. Pro Bono was never for the United States government or for a billionaire president. You know, and in fact, a number of young lawyers at these big firms that settled, these associates, and even students in law school, are really concerned about basically what's happened here, and they either don't wanna go work for these firms

or get contracted to do this kind of pro bono work that's for the Trump administration, or they wanna walk with their feet if they already got there. It is interesting looking for pro bono work if you're Trump because he certainly needed some in the past couple of years. I mean, he spent tens of millions of dollars raising money because of the cases that were brought against him.

So it's notable to hear him saying that all of these firms that either went against him or were involved with people who opposed various aspects of his agenda, he wants these law firms will then do for him. And I think it's notable that there's been such a losing streak for the Trump administration in the courts. And you have to wonder if some of these big law firms that made deals with Trump, if they're regretting making those deals considering how much judges have kind of pushed back on the administration for this executive order in the first place. Well, let's get into that, Carrie, because a number of the law firms that did not make

the deals have... Can you explain, I guess, how they have fought back against the administration and the orders that they've made. Yeah, absolutely. Within a relatively short period of time after Trump issued these executive orders, four of the law firms sued over them and they're winning. They're winning in court. They're basically arguing that these executive orders are amounts of retaliation and viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment. They're arguing there's a separation of powers issue here because it's the judicial branch that's supposed to regulate and punish lawyers, not the White House. And they're also saying that this really interferes with somebody's ability to get a lawyer, which is promised under the

Sixth Amendment. And so judges, no matter what political party they were appointed by, have largely been siding with these firms. Some have even gone so far as to say that the firms who settled are going to have a bad place in American history. Wow. So, Domenico, stepping back a little bit, can you talk, you mentioned that Trump's targeting of institutions more broadly. How are you watching this in terms of thinking about whether this gives the Trump administration cover to go after things like colleges?

Well, I wonder about the politics of this and whether or not the Trump administration winds up going too far and how much that winds up trickling down to the Republican Party writ large, because, you know, you have the midterms coming up in 2026. There are not a whole lot of seats out there that can be targeted. When these things pile up, the more it looks like petty retribution, the less people seem to like that and feel like the Trump administration, Trump himself, is not as focused on the things that got him elected in the first place like prices. That makes a lot of sense. It's less so defending the law firms and more like,

wait, why are you focused on this? What is this doing for me? And what is this about? I mean, most people are not paying attention this closely. Most people will never get within a stone's throw of the buildings that these law firms are at. The amount of money that they cost is something that is just unfathomable for most people, right? The idea that Trump just has this sort of niche kind of vengeance or retribution want against these folks, you know, I think doesn't register with a lot of people. Danielle Pletka Yeah.

One thing that these firms do and have done is that in their pro bono work and the free legal services they provide, they can help very small nonprofit groups, say in the immigration space or the environmental space, really with a lot of resources and brain power to try to challenge things the White House is doing that they think are illegal or discriminatory. And one of the reasons, one of the possible reasons why these executive orders came about in the first place may be to stop law firms from raising their hands and volunteering to frustrate Trump's immigration agenda and environmental agenda and deregulatory agenda. Because these people are really smart.

They know the law and there's a reason they're paid as well as they are. And certainly if Trump can put them on the sidelines and put them on ice, it certainly helps his agenda way more. Wow. OK, well, we can leave it there for now. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Kerry Johnson. I cover the Justice Department.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the MPR Politics Podcast.