Trump Gets PANIC ATTACKS as DOJ LAWYERS Start LOSING LICENSES!

[00:00:00]Well, in back-to-back rulings Friday night, two federal judges temporarily blocked President Trump's executive orders targeting specific high-profile law firms. The orders signed this week restrict the firms from working with federal agencies. The firms have represented and employed President Trump's political opponents. Meanwhile, two other law firms have entered into agreements with the White House to avoid sanctions. CBS News Justice Correspondent Scott McFarland has more from Washington.

[00:00:31]>> A flurry of activity in the courts late into the night Friday night. Some of the largest and most name brand law firms in America fighting to stay alive, to stay in business. They accuse the Trump administration of targeting them with executive orders that would be a basic death sentence for firms like WilmerHale, firms like Perkins Coie. And they've been in court challenging the executive orders that have put them in dire straits. The Trump administration >> Okay. So, here is a story about professional accountability for lawyers who participated in the 2020 election subversion effort. And it is specifically significant because bar disciplinary proceedings represent the one accountability arena that has continued to advance even as criminal prosecutions have stalled in the second term. Here is the documented picture with its appropriate sourcing hierarchy.

[00:01:20]Courthouse News, a credible legal news outlet, documented that the DC Bar's disciplinary arm recommended disbarment of Jeffrey Clark, the former DOJ Environmental Division Chief, who attempted to help Trump overturn the 2020 election by pushing letters to swing states that falsely claimed DOJ was investigated widespread fraud. Clark is accused of attempting to misuse DOJ powers based on knowingly false fraud claims, violating court ethics rules requiring candor and honesty in government service. The Trump Justice Department documented through Courthouse News and YouTube source coverage that requires the standard caveat, responded by filing a a lawsuit against the DC Bar seeking to undercut its ability to discipline federal lawyers and effectively shield Clark from the disbarment recommendation. PBS documented former DOJ officials saying Trump's attacks on DOJ independence and his elevation of loyalists have decimated the agency and shattered public trust with mass departures of experienced prosecutors in counterterrorism and public corruption units described as leaving the country simply less safe. Bloomberg Law published an essay by former Fordham Law Dean Matthew Diller characterizing Trump's executive orders yanking security clearances and federal contracts from law firms including Covington and Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss as unprecedented since McCarthyism and designed to intimidate lawyers out of taking cases against the administration. And Harry Litman, a legal analyst, is described in the brief as having reported through YouTube that additional Trump lawyers tied to 2020 election subversion have been referred to bar authorities with some facing suspension hearings, though this is YouTube sourced legal commentary whose accuracy I know with the standard YouTube caveat. Before we go any further, the panic attacks framing in the headline requires the same calibration I apply throughout this series. There is no documented evidence of Trump having panic attacks, and characterizing presidential concern about bar proceedings as panic is an editorial escalation. What is documented is the Trump DOJ filing a federal lawsuit against the DC Bar, which is the behavioral accountability signal of taking the disbarment proceeding seriously enough to take legal action to stop them. That documented behavioral response suing the bar association rather than accepting its jurisdiction is the functional equivalent of what the brief calls panic in its documentary form. That is why we built Pump Politics. Real stories, real context, no corporate spin. Join our free newsletter and get the news straight to your inbox every single day. Click the link in the description, and if you want to support what we are building, join the community. All right, back to it.

[00:03:48]>> Let's talk about another issue that's been making headlines, and that is some of the actions the Trump administration has been taking against law firms that it sees as unfriendly toward it. Now, some pushback. We've got a federal judge blocking this new executive order from the president yesterday that punished one prominent law firm. That firm had successfully sued the news Fox News for promoting those false claims of election fraud. You might remember a few years ago. The judge called the order a quote shocking abuse of power. Is there a precedent for punishing a law firm for winning a case? I mean, talk about where we're at right now with this legal issue.

[00:04:21]>> So, this is an issue I'm obviously biased on because as an attorney and having many colleagues and friends who are in these major law firms, I guess I have to say I feel a little protective of the legal profession. So, forgive my bias, but this to me is playing out exactly as I predicted or thought it might because when you attack law firms for their exercise of their First Amendment rights, and it is clear that advocacy to a court >> Let me explain why bar disciplinary proceedings are the specific accountability mechanism that this script story is most importantly about and why the Trump DOJ suing the DC bar is the most significant accountability signal in the documented record. We have covered throughout this series the pattern of criminal prosecution stalling, the DOJ reorganization under Blanche, the Bonda fire for insufficient political prosecutions departure, the anti-weaponization fund fraud on court inquiry. All of those accountability mechanisms operate within the executive branch's own legal and political architecture, which gives the Trump administration documented institutional control over how they proceed. Bar disciplinary proceedings are different.

[00:05:26]They are conducted by professional self-regulatory bodies, the DC bar, state bars operating under their own jurisdictional authority rather than under federal executive control. The Trump DOJ suing the DC bar to stop it from proceeding against Clark is the documented evidence of the administration recognizing that bar disciplinary proceedings represent an accountability arena outside its direct institutional control and responding by attempting to bring that arena under federal judicial control through litigation. All right, so let us go through the specific documented elements carefully because the Jeffrey Clark disbarment recommendation, the DOJ lawsuit against the DC bar, the law firm executive orders and the DOJ decimated former official accounts each deserve their own analysis. Let us start with Jeffrey Clark and why his case is specifically significant in the 2020 election subversion accountability picture. Clark's documented role in the 2020 post-election period is one of the most specifically documented of any Trump allies conduct during that period.

[00:06:21]He was the DOJ's Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, not an election law or fraud expert, who attempted to use the DOJ's institutional authority to send letters to Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other swing states falsely claiming that DOJ was investigating widespread fraud and suggesting state legislatures consider convening alternate electors. Those letters were never sent because Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his Deputy Richard Donoghue refused to authorize them threatening to resign en masse along with DOJ leadership if Clark was elevated to Acting AG Trump was considering. The documented January 2021 meeting between Trump, Clark, Rosen, and Donoghue in which Trump came close to appointing Clark before being told of the planned mass resignation is one of the most specifically documented moments in the 2020 post-election accountability record. Clark's conduct in that period, specifically using DOJ institutional authority to advance false fraud claims to influence state election processes, is the specific conduct the DC bar disciplinary recommendation is addressing. The disbarment recommendation specific legal basis is the professional ethics violation dimension that makes it most significant as an accountability mechanism. Bar disciplinary proceeding evaluate attorney conduct against the model rules of professional conduct which includes specific prohibitions on false statements of fact, making frivolous claims, and engaging in conduct involving dishonesty or deceit. Clark's attempt to have DOJ send letters asserting widespread fraud investigations that DOJ's own investigators did not believe existed based on DOJ's own documented findings is the conduct that DC Bar is assessing against those professional ethics standards. The disbarment recommendation reflects the DC Bar disciplinary arms assessment. Clark's conduct was so far outside professional ethics standards that the most severe available penalty, disbarment, is warranted. That assessment from the professional self-regulatory body that governs attorney conduct in the DC legal community is the most specific and most authoritative available characterization Clark's 2020 conduct as professionally disqualifying. The Trump DOJ suing the DC Bar to stop the proceedings is the most specifically significant documented response because it reveals the administration's assessment of the bar proceeding seriousness. A government that considers bar disciplinary proceedings inconsequential does not file federal lawsuits to stop them. The Trump DOJ filing a federal lawsuit against the DC Bar to undercut his authority to discipline federal lawyers is the documented behavioral evidence that the administration assesses the Clark disbarment proceedings as a serious enough threat to Clark and potentially to other Trump lawyers to justify the extraordinary step of suing the professional self-regulatory body itself.

[00:08:56]The specific legal theory the lawsuit is advancing that the DC Bar lacks authority to discipline federal lawyers for their official conduct is itself a significant constitutional claim about professional self-regulatory authority over federal employees that courts have not definitively resolved. The law firm executive orders are the second tier of Trump's documented broader war on the legal profession and they deserve their own analysis as a distinct but connected accountability mechanism. Trump issuing executive orders, yanking security clearances and federal contracts from Covington and Burling, Perkins Coie and Paul Weiss is the documented use of presidential economic power to punish law firms that have taken cases or employed lawyers Trump dislikes.

[00:09:34]Covington and Burling represented James Comey in proceedings Trump dislikes.

[00:09:38]Perkins Coie represented Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. Paul Weiss employed attorneys involved in legal proceedings Trump dislikes. The executive orders targeting these firms for their legal representation choices is the documented extension of the enemies list retribution pattern from political figures to legal institutions.

[00:09:55]In the Bloomberg Law, Matthew Diller essay characterizing them as unprecedented since McCarthyism is the legal academic community's documented assessment of how severely those orders depart from historical norms about the relationship between government and legal representation. The McCarthyism comparison in the Diller Bloomberg essay deserves specific documentation because the historical parallel is specific and significant. McCarthyism's impact on the legal profession in the 1950s included pressure on law firms to fire attorneys associated with communist affiliated organizations or suspected of disloyalty, producing a documented chilling effect on legal profession in politically sensitive cases. Diller's characterization of Trump's law firm targeting as unprecedented since McCarthyism is the legal academic community's documented professional assessment that the executive orders represent the most severe use of government economic pressure against law firms for their representation choices since the period widely considered one of the darkest in American civil liberties history. That professional assessment from a named former law school dean published in Bloomberg Law is the specific credential analytical documentation of the accountability significance of the law firm targeting.

[00:11:04]The PBS documented DOJ decimated accounts add the institutional accountability dimension to the professional disciplinary proceedings.

[00:11:11]Former DOJ officials describing mass departures of experienced prosecutors in counterterrorism and public corruption units leaving the country simply less safe is the documented institutional consequence of Trump's DOJ reorganization that we have covered throughout the Bond Day departure and Blanche AG scripts. The simply less safe characterization is former officials professional assessment of the public safety consequence, not just an abstract governance concern, but a documented professional judgment about the operational capability impact of the experienced prosecutor departures. A DOJ that has lost experienced counterterrorism and public corruption prosecutors has documented reduced institutional capacity in exactly the domains where institutional expertise matters most for public safety outcomes.

[00:11:55]The broader pattern the former DOJ officials Courthouse News documented accounts describe attorneys bending or breaking rules to serve Trump personally rather than the law is the professional ethics characterization of the conduct that bar disciplinary proceedings are now assessing. That characterization from experienced former DOJ officials rather than political opponents is the professional community's internal accountability assessment of what the second term DOJ represents in terms of departure from the institutional norms those officials understand and from direct experience. The bar disciplinary proceedings are the formal accountability mechanism that translates those professional community assessments into binding professional consequences or attempts to against specific named lawyers whose conduct the former officials are describing. Okay, so let me be really clear about what the documented bar proceedings, the DOJ lawsuit against the DC bar, and the law firm executive orders mean, and what they specifically establish about the professional accountability architecture for Trump era legal conduct. The first thing to understand is why bar disciplinary proceedings specifically matter in the 2020 accountability picture despite not being criminal proceedings. We covered the Bolton plea deal, the Corcoran Trump compelled testimony, the privilege claim rejections, the Trump lawyer crumble script as the legal accountability dimension of the Trump legal team's documented conduct. Bar disciplinary proceedings added different accountability mechanism, professional rather than criminal, whose consequences are professional license rather than criminal sanction, but whose assessment of attorney conduct involves a professional ethics standard that the legal community itself enforces. The specific accountability significance of bar proceedings is that they produce documented professional community judgments about whether specific attorney conduct meets the standards of the profession independent of criminal prosecution decisions operating through a mechanism the Trump administration cannot simply redirect through DOJ control. The second layer we're sitting with is the DOJ suing the DC Bar and what it specifically means for the professional self-regulation architecture. Professional self-regulation through bar associations is the specific institutional mechanism that has historically governed attorney conduct accountability in the American legal system. Bar associations operating under state Supreme Court authority have the documented jurisdiction to discipline attorneys within their jurisdictions for professional conduct violations. The Trump DOJ suing the DC Bar to challenge that jurisdiction over federal lawyers is the documented attempt to create a federal legal precedent that removes the professional self-regulation mechanism from the accountability arsenal available against Trump aligned federal lawyers. If that lawsuit succeeds, federal lawyers could be isolated from bar disciplinary action for their official conduct, removing the one accountability mechanism that operates outside direct executive control. The third layer is the McCarthyism parallel that the Diller-Bloomberg essay documents and what it means for the legal profession's independence. We covered throughout the series the documented enemies list and retribution pattern, the law firm executive orders, the Bondi fire for insufficient prosecution story, the Blanche now AG story. The Diller essay adds a legal historical context characterizing the current targeting of law firms for the representation choices as the most severe such since McCarthyism. The chilling effect on legal representation that McCarthyism produced, lawyers declining to take politically sensitive cases for fear of government retaliation, is the specific documented historical consequence the Diller comparison is pointing at. An environment in which law firms lose security clearances and federal contracts for their representation choices is documented as producing exactly that chilling effect. Lawyers declining to take cases against the administration to protect their firms' financial relationships. Now, to give the complete and fair picture, Trump and his supporters have arguments about the Clark disbarment proceedings in the DOJ lawsuit against the DC Bar that deserve acknowledgement. They will argue that Bar disciplinary proceedings against Clark are politically motivated, that Clark was exercising his professional judgement about potential fraud evidence that deserve investigation, and that disbarring a lawyer for providing legal advice a political opponent disagrees with sets a dangerous precedent for the independence of government lawyers. They will argue that the DOJ lawsuit against the DC Bar reflects a legitimate constitutional question about whether state bar associations have authority to discipline federal lawyers conduct, and that resolving that question through litigation is appropriate rather than simply accepting Bar jurisdiction without challenge. And they will argue that the law firm executive orders reflect legitimate presidential authority to decide which firms the government contracts with, and that firms which take cases adversarial to the government can legitimately expect that the government will choose not to use their services. These are real arguments. Government lawyers do deserve some protection for professional legal advice. Bar jurisdiction over federal lawyers involves genuine constitutional questions. Government contracting decisions involve legitimate executive discretion. These deserve acknowledgement. But here is what those arguments run into when you apply them to the documented record. The DC Bar disciplinary arms recommended disbarment of Clark is based on its documented finding that Clark attempted to misuse DOJ powers based on knowingly false fraud claims, not on the basis of legal advice that turned out to be wrong, but on the basis of a professional finding that the claims were knowingly false at the time. The knowing falseness finding is the specific professional ethics determination that distinguishes the Clark conduct from protected professional legal advice. Professionals who knowingly advance false claims are not providing protected professional advice, but violating the candor requirements that define ethical professional conduct. And the Diller Bloomberg essay's McCarthyism comparison from a name credentials former law school dean is specifically about law firms being targeted for the representation choices different category from government contracting decisions made on the basis of performance or cost. So here is the bottom line on all of this. The DC Bar disciplinary arm recommended disbarment of Jeffrey Clark for attempting to misuse DOJ powers based on knowingly false fraud claims documented by Courthouse News. The Trump DOJ filed a federal lawsuit against the DC Bar to undercut its authority to discipline federal lawyers documented as a response to the Clark proceedings. PBS documents it former DOJ officials describing the agency as decimated with mass departures of experienced prosecutors leaving the country simply less safe. Bloomberg Law published former Fordham Law Dean Matthew Diller's characterization of Trump's law firm executive orders targeting Covington and Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss as unprecedented since McCarthyism. Harry Litman's YouTube source commentary noted with the standard YouTube caveat describes additional referrals to bar authorities and the documented pattern of former DOJ officials warning that attorneys bent or broke rules to serve Trump personally now facing professional consequences is the accountability picture the script covers. But hey, if you think the Jeffrey Clark disbarment recommendation and the DOJ lawsuit against the DC Bar represent the final chapter of the professional accountability story, the lawsuit's outcome and whether federal courts determine that the DC Bar has jurisdiction over federal lawyers for their official conduct will either confirm or overturn the one accountability mechanism that operates outside direct executive control. If the courts find jurisdiction, Clark faces disbarment and the professional accountability precedent is established.

[00:18:56]If the courts find no jurisdiction, federal lawyers gain documented protection from bar proceedings for official conduct removing the professional accountability backstop.

[00:19:04]You are going to want to be here when that judicial determination arrives.