General
Vengeance Is His
With Trump back in the White House, each new week produces an onslaught of radical policy initiatives. In an essay posted on Substack, Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described a sequence — running from Feb. 21 to Feb. 27 — of what …
With Trump back in the White House, each new week produces an onslaught of radical policy initiatives.
In an essay posted on Substack, Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described a sequence — running from Feb. 21 to Feb. 27 — of what are in effect warnings designed to intimidate and even silence the nation’s legal community.
Vladeck explained the significance of these developments:
In addition to revoking the security clearances, Trump wrote in a Feb. 25 memorandum, “I also direct the Attorney General and heads of agencies to take such actions as are necessary to terminate any engagement of Covington & Burling LLP by any agency to the maximum extent permitted by law and consistent with the memorandum that shall be issued by the director of the Office of Management and Budget.”
The effects of the Trump administration’s initiatives soon become apparent. On Feb. 26, Bloomberg reporters Ben Penn and Tatyana Monnay described some of the reverberations of the Trump edict in “Covington Revenge Deepens Worries of Defending Trump Targets.”
“Some firm leaders,” they wrote, “citing corporate clients threatening to walk if they get crosswise with Trump, have rejected outright or put up roadblocks to partners seeking approval to represent D.O.J. lawyers, F.B.I. agents, and other civil servants who’ve faced various forms of attack.”
Penn and Monnay reported that their sources told them that
It’s not just the left and the center that finds the administration’s policies disturbing:
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, warned in a Feb. 26 essay, “Trump Punishes Large Law Firm for Representing His Adversary,” that the president’s actions threaten “the loss of an independent and qualified bar willing to stand up to authority.”
The implications of the revocation of security clearances, Olson continued, “go far beyond the practice of national security law. Anyone can find themselves in a fight with Trump or his allies on almost any topic under the sun, and the question is whether the counsel representing you in that dispute has to fear being made the next Covington.”
